Time perception is important for many aspects of human behavior, and a large literature documents that adults represent intervals and that their ability to discriminate temporal intervals is ratio dependent. Here we replicate a recent study by vanMarle and Wynn (2006 ) that used the visual habituation paradigm and demonstrated that temporal…

Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Results suggested that at 4 months, infants attended primarily to the featural information, at 6 months primarily to the asynchrony, and at 8 months to both features independently. (Author/KB)

Reports the results of two experiments dealing with children's visual and tactual performance. In the first task, after several presentations of a series, the tactual group made almost errorless discriminations. But with memory demands, tactual performance became poorer than visual performance. Found a large developmental difference. (JAC)

Comparison of the auditory frequency resolving ability of preschool children, school-aged children, and adults found data from children as young as three-years-old that were qualitatively indistinguishable from adult data though threshold estimates from young children were more variable from run to run than from adults. Increasing age improved…

Research supported by University of Massachusetts Faculty Research Grant, National Institute of Mental Health grant MH-03803-06, and National Science Foundation grant GS-386.

Subjects of this study were 19- and 23-week-old infants. Results showed that the older infants demonstrated differential attention to novel over familiar stimuli during recognition tests. An examination of their responsiveness during familiarization presentations indicated differing trends of looking activity. (Author/CS)

The ability of 10 normal-speaking 5-year-olds and 10-normal-speaking 7-year-olds to categorize consonants as "dripping" (stop), "flowing" (fricative), "tongue" (lingual place of articulation), "or "lip" (labial place of articulation) was evaluated. Children's ability to categorize was evaluated as an indicator of their awareness of feature…

Age and condition (either constancy-relevant or variability-relevant) interact, with the youngest group in the constancy-relevant condition performing most poorly on concept identification tasks. (MH)

This study evaluated the ability of 30 normally developing children (ages 6-12) to report the perceived location of a stationary fused auditory image (FAI) or track a "moving" FAI. Although subjects performed at normal adult levels with the stationary sound measure, they exhibited a significant age-related trend with the moving sound…

This study investigated the way 12 infants, aged 1 month and 2 months, scanned the still and expressionless faces of their mothers, of strange women, and of strange men. Each infant was placed in a padded head-restraining cradle under a half-silvered mirror which was angled at 45 degrees to enable the child to view an adult's face at an optical…

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

Two experiments used phoneme counting tasks to investigate the foundations of phonemic awareness. Found that first graders and college students had some ability to distinguish between monophthongs (as in "he") and diphthongs (as in "how"), and they tended to count fewer "sounds" for syllables ending with the more…