During adolescence, increases in pubertal hormones lead to reproductive maturity as well as changes in cognitive development. Yet, little is known about how to best characterize interindividual differences in hormone concentrations. The goal of the current study was to examine the antecedents and consequences of membership in empirically derived…

Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here,…

Older adults often face decline in cognitive resources. How does this impact their decision making--especially under high cognitive demands from concurrent activities? Do older adults' decision processes uniformly decline with increasing mental strain relative to younger adults, or do they compensate for decline by strategically reallocating…

We studied the role of sensorimotor and working memory systems in supporting development of perceptual rhythm processing with 119 participants aged 7-12 years. Children were assessed for their abilities in sensorimotor synchronization (SMS; beat tapping), auditory working memory (AWM; digit span), and rhythm discrimination (RD; same/different…

Previous work suggests that adolescents are still refining acoustic-phonetic cue use in clear-speech perception. This study shows adolescents' immature perception of reduced speech, in which speech sounds are naturally deleted and merged within and across words. German adults and 16-year-olds listened to either German reduced or unreduced (few or…

The mature visual system condenses complex scenes into simple summary statistics (e.g., average size, location, orientation, etc.). However, children, often perform poorly on perceptual averaging tasks. Children's difficulties are typically thought to represent the suboptimal implementation of an adult-like strategy. This paper examines another…

This study investigated the developmental trajectories of three perceptual domains related to regional dialect competence: the linguistic domain, tested through an intelligibility in noise task; the objective indexical domain, tested through locality judgments and a free classification task; and the subjective indexical domain, tested through…

Three experiments assessed the development of children's part and configural (part-relational) processing in object recognition during adolescence. In total, 312 school children aged 7-16 years and 80 adults were tested in 3-alternative forced choice (3-AFC) tasks. They judged the correct appearance of upright and inverted presented familiar…

Two studies examined developmental differences in how children weigh capability and objectivity when evaluating potential judges. In Study 1, 84 6- to 12-year-olds and adults were told stories about pairs of judges that varied in capability (i.e., perceptual capacity) and objectivity (i.e., the relationship to a contestant) and were asked to…

This study examined reasoning about gender roles in a traditional society in Benin, West Africa. Ninety-seven male and female adolescents and adults evaluated conflicts between a husband and a wife over gender norms to determine whether gender norms, are judged to be moral or conventional. Although most attributed decision-making power to the…

Two experiments studied the impact of the nature of information available at different processing levels on differences in haptic (tactile) and in visual, free classification development. Found that exploration characteristics (involving simultaneous versus independent processing of stimulus dimensions) and presentation of the stimulus dimensions…

Research supported by a N.S.F. fellowship for graduate teaching assistants granted to the senior author.

In order to determine if there are developmental effects on information integration and dispositional attributions, 145 adolescents at two ages (13 and 18) were presented with information about hypothetical peers. (Author/MP)

Risk-taking attitudes and behaviors among young and elderly adults were investigated. Elderly subjects, from both a nursing home and the community, and college students responded to choice dilemmas involving aged central characters. Each subject responded twice, once under "self" instructions, and once as the "average elderly person" would…

This study explored the perception of career/family conflict in adolescent girls to determine how that conflict affects their career-related decisions; how this effect changes over time; and the effect of parental attitudes and marital relationships on this process. Research and results are described. (JL)