Temporal proximity is one of the key factors determining whether events in different modalities are integrated into a unified percept. Sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony has been studied in adults in great detail. However, how such sensitivity matures during childhood is poorly understood. We examined perception of audiovisual temporal…

Although the human proclivity to engage in impression management and care for reputation is ubiquitous, the question of its developmental outset remains open. In 4 studies, we demonstrate that the sensitivity to the evaluation of others (i.e., evaluative audience perception) is manifest by 24 months. In a first study, 14- to 24-month-old children…

Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term…

A crucial component of numerical understanding is one's ability to abstract numerical properties regardless of varying perceptual attributes. Evidence from numerical match-to-sample tasks suggests that children find it difficult to match sets based on number in the face of varying perceptual attributes, yet it is unclear whether these findings are…

Purpose: This study examined whether the perceived taste intensity of liquids with chemesthetic properties influenced lingua-palatal pressures and submental surface electromyography (sEMG) in swallowing, compared with water. Method: Swallowing was studied in 80 healthy women, stratified by age group and genetic taste status. General Labeled…

The developmental trajectories of selective and divided attention were examined in relation to the processing of hierarchically integrated stimuli. The participants included children in 4 age groups (6, 8, 10, and 12 years) and a group of young adults (24 years) who completed 2 computer-based attention tasks. In the selective attention task, the…

Research to date has focused mostly on children's representation of their physical self as a prelude to the development of a theory of mind (ToM) and on their understanding of the self as distinct from others over time. Whether children approaching the well-known age of ToM mastery are also accurately appraising their own "body's"…

We conducted 3 studies to explore cultural differences in global versus local processing and their developmental trajectories. In Study 1 ("N" = 363), we found that Japanese college students were less globally oriented in their processing than American or Argentine participants. We replicated this effect in Study 2 ("N" =…

Adults preferentially use information from the left side of face images to judge gender, emotion, and identity. In this study, we examined the development of this visual-field bias over middle childhood (5-10 years). Our goal was to both characterize the developmental trajectory of the left-side bias (should one exist) and examine the selectivity…

It is possible that statistical learning (SL) plays a role in almost every mental activity. Indeed, research on SL has grown rapidly over recent decades in an effort to better understand perception and cognition. Yet, there remain gaps in our understanding of how SL operates, in particular with regard to its (im)mutability. Here, we investigated…

We investigated perception of social and physical causality and animacy in simple motion events, for high-functioning children with autism (CA = 13, VMA = 9.6). Children matched 14 different animations to pictures showing physical, social or non-causality. In contrast to previous work, children with autism performed at a high level similar to…

Early in development, there is a transition in spatial working memory (SWM). When remembering a location in a homogeneous space (e.g., in a sandbox), young children are biased toward the midline symmetry axis of the space. Over development, a transition occurs that leads to older children being biased away from midline. The dynamic field theory…

Examined whether experience correctly producing consonants plays role in developing underlying representation which mediates perception of visible speech. Tested preschoolers (divided by their making of substitution errors) and adults in auditory-only, visual-only, and audiovisual conditions. Found children overall showed less visual influence and…

Results showed that infants can differentiate dynamic, multimodal expressions as early as five months of age; can distinguish dynamically distinct expressions before similarly animated expressions; and seem to rely more on the voice than the face in making these discriminations. (RH)

Results provided evidence that 6- and 12-week-old infants' preferences for a moving set of stripes over a stationary set were based on the velocity rather than on the temporal frequency of stripe movement. Estimated velocity thresholds of 9 degrees per second for 6 week olds and 4 degrees per second for 12 week olds extended results of previous…