Four experiments examined how faces compete with physically salient stimuli for the control of attention in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants (N = 117 total). Three computational models were used to quantify physical salience. We presented infants with visual search arrays containing a face and familiar object(s), such as shoes and flowers. Six- and…

Three-dimensional (3D) object completion, the ability to perceive the backs of objects seen from a single viewpoint, emerges at around 6 months of age. Yet, only relatively simple 3D objects have been used in assessing its development. This study examined infants' 3D object completion when presented with more complex stimuli. Infants…

Purpose: To examine whether semantic access by speech requires attention in children. Method: Children ("N" = 200) named pictures and ignored distractors on a cross-modal (distractors: auditory-no face) or multimodal (distractors: auditory-static face and audiovisual- dynamic face) picture word task. The cross-modal task had a low load,…

Most international adoptees (IA) have rapid catch-up of the delays common at arrival. However, it is not known whether development at arrival predicts later abilities or school readiness. Therefore, we comprehensively evaluated language, fine motor, visual reception (VR), executive function (EF), attention (ATT), and sensory skills (SS) in IA…

The hypothesis that perceptual development proceeds from less to greater dimensional separability was tested by giving a speeded classification task to first and fourth graders. Results supported the hypothesis that development proceeds toward greater flexibility of attention rather than simply toward increasing separability. (Author/DB)

Examined which of the attentional operations underlying exogenous orienting (disengaging, shifting, and/or engaging) improves with age in children from 6 to 14 years old. Found that disengaging attention alone distinguished between younger and older children's performance, regardless of whether attention alone or attention and associated sensory…

Examined developmental change and stability of visual expectation and reaction times among 5-, 7-, and 12-month-old term and preterm infants. Found that reaction times declined with age while anticipations increased. Infants with faster reaction times were more likely to anticipate upcoming events; this effect disappeared when time between stimuli…

The size of the effective visual field during the first weeks of life is found to depend on two factors: It increases with age, but contracts in the face of competition from ongoing activity such as fixation of a central stimulus or nonnutritive sucking. (Author/SB)

The primary purpose of this study was to examine whether a general perceptual model developed by Vitz and Todd (1971), capable of dealing with multiple determinants of attending, is useful for understanding infant attending. The model, previously used in research with adults, assumes that perception can be represented as a stochastic sampling…

Examined in two studies the moderating effect of perceptual load on visual selective attention. Found that children's performance was as efficient as adults' under conditions of high but not low loads, suggesting that early selection engages rapidly maturing neural systems and late selection engages later-maturing systems. The onset of early…

Assessed infants' detection of relative motion between a target and its surrounding static reference features in two experiments. Found evidence for 8- and 20-week-olds' detection of a moving target, and a target and surrounding reference features moving in opposite directions. Twenty-week-olds detected a target that moved faster and in the same…

We used an encoder version of cascade correlation to simulate Younger and Cohen's (1983, 1986) finding that 10-month-olds recover attention on the basis of correlations among stimulus features, but 4- and 7-month-olds recover attention on the basis of stimulus features. We captured these effects by varying the score threshold parameter in cascade…

As children grow older they show an increasing preference for classifying objects on the basis of shape rather than color. To clarify the nature of this "dimension preference," children of ages 3 1/2 to 6 1/2 years were given a method of triads test of dimension preferences, followed (after a week's delay) by a component selection task. The most…