Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…

Adult literacy training is known to be difficult in terms of teaching and maintenance (Abadzi, 2003), perhaps because adults who recently learned to read in their first language have not acquired reading automaticity. This study examines fast word recognition process in neoliterate adults, to evaluate whether they show evidence of perceptual…

The visual working memory forms the basis for cognitive processes in learning, and it is therefore of interest to gain greater insight into gender and age differences in visual working memory among pupils. In this study, we wanted to see if there are differences between children in first, third, fifth, seventh and ninth grade in Norwegian schools…

Two experiments examined the origins of joint visual attention in 6- to 11-month-olds with a training procedure. Results indicated that joint visual attention does not reliably appear prior to 10 months; from about 8 months, a gaze-following response can be learned; and simple learning is not sufficient as the mechanism through which joint…

The study tested the existence of communication between visual and haptic senses with 3- and 5-year-old children. Major finding: only visual-haptic training improved performance on the haptic indentification test. Apparently there was no transfer across sense modalities. (ST)

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)

Results of two experiments minimizing verbal encoding and response demands indicate that when the ceiling effects in no-mask target recognition are removed, the visual information processing rates for children and adults can be considered equivalent. (Author/RH)

Two experiments examined the development of children's memory for spatial location or color. Results refuted the proposal that in contrast to color, spatial location would not show developmental improvement because it is remembered automatically. Suggests that, for the age range studied, there was developmental change in the efficiency of…

Four experiments investigated phonemic and visual similarity effects in 5- and 10-year olds. Results suggested that young children rely on modality-dependent codes, which are probably automatically activated, and do not use a speech-based memory code for drawings and words. This pattern of findings appeared to be independent of culture and…

This study compared the effects of two types of incidental learning paradigms and examined the influence of different kinds of stimulus relationships on first and sixth graders' selective learning processes. (GO)

Recent findings [Turcotte, Gagnon, & Poirier, 2005. The effect of old age on the learning of supra-span sequences. "Psychology and Aging," 20, 251-260.] indicate that incidental learning of visuo-spatial supra-span sequences through immediate serial recall declines with old age (Hebb's paradigm). In this study, we examined whether…

Five experiments examined children's use of eye gaze information for inferring another person's desire. Found that 4-year olds used another's eye direction to infer desires, while 3-year olds could use other nonverbal cues. Two- and 3-year olds used eye gaze for desire inference when presented dynamically with other scaffolding cues. When…