A remarkable amount of perceptual development occurs in the first year after birth. In this article, we spotlight the case of color perception. We outline how within just 6 months, infants go from very limited detection of color as newborns to a more sophisticated perception of color that enables them to make sense of objects and the world around…

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity of eye-tracking methods to evaluate infant and toddler interpretation of visual stimuli. The application of these methods makes it increasingly important to understand the development of infant sensitivity to the perceptual properties implicated in such methods. In light of recent studies that…

This study compared role of motion in adults' and infants' perception of object unity. Findings favored ecologically-oriented accounts of object perception. Motion was a determinant of object unity for infants. Alignment and common motion contributed to adults' object-unity perception; synchronous color changes did not. Infants detected…

Reports on age differences found in children's (1) ability to execute appropriate differences in the uses of color while completing partially drawn scenes; and (2) sensitivity to differences between heraldic, gradation, harmonic, and pure use of color in a matching task. (GC)

Investigated two developmental implications: (1) that foci for color categories become established and stabilized earlier than boundaries, and (2) that focal judgments are always more stable than boundary judgments. Subjects were 20 kindergarteners, 40 third graders and 40 adults. (Author/SDH)

A sample of 107 subjects including kindergarteners, fifth graders, high school sophomores, parents of kindergarteners, and master artists were presented with a 108-item color perception test to investigate surface color perception at these age levels. A set of surface color perception rules was generated. (GO)

Describes two studies that demonstrate young children's perception of color materials differs from that of adults in two ways: (1) the stimulus dimensions of hue, chroma, and value appear to result in somewhat more separable perception for young children than for adults, and (2) the perceived similarities the color materials are not the same for…

Two experiments explored the nature of perceptual development in 5- and 10-year olds and adults. The primary finding was that preassessed salience significantly influenced 5-year olds' ability to discriminate two objects, while salience did not affect 10-year olds' or adults' response times. Results showed that salience effects in perceptual…

Two experiments examined developmental changes in reasoning about intensive quantities--predicting mixture intensity of pairs of liquids with different intensities of red color. Results showed that cognitive averaging in this domain developed late and slowly. Predominating up to 12 years was an extensivity bias, a strong tendency to use rules that…