Previous studies demonstrated that dual-task impairments are higher in children than in young adults. A previous study systematically assessed the sources of these larger dual-task impairments by identifying age-related differences in capacity limitations during dual-task processing. Capacity limitations in central cognitive processes were present…

Purpose: Most research examining long-term-memory effects on nonword repetition (NWR) has focused on lexical-level variables. Phoneme-level variables have received little attention, although there are reasons to expect significant sublexical effects in NWR. To further understand the underlying processes of NWR, this study examined effects of…

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…

With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6- and 8-month-olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue-reward…

Using an identification task, we examined lexical effects on the perception of vowel duration as a cue to final consonant voicing in 12 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 13 age-matched (6;6-9;6) peers with typical language development (TLD). Naturally recorded CVtsets [word-word (WW), nonword-nonword (NN), word-nonword (WN) and…

Using the concepts of sensory and affective experience, this work relates the concepts of socialization and cognitive development to the embodiment of gender in the human infant. Evidence obtained from biweekly observations from 30 children and their mothers observed from age 3 months to age 12 months revealed measurable sex-related differences in…

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…

The hypothesis that lonely children show hypervigilance for social threat was examined in a series of three studies that employed different methods including advanced eye-tracking technology. Hypervigilance for social threat was operationalized as hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion in a variation of the hostile attribution…

Change blindness refers to the difficulty most people find in detecting a difference between two pictures when these are presented successively, with a brief interruption between. Attention at the site of the change is required for detection. A number of studies have investigated change blindness in adults and children with autism spectrum…

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…

Temporal order judgements (TOJ) for two tactile stimuli, one presented to the left and one to the right hand, are less precise when the hands are crossed over the midline than when the hands are uncrossed. This "crossed hand" effect has been considered as evidence for a remapping of tactile input into an external reference frame. Since late, but…

Methods used to assess children's speech perception and recognition in the clinical setting are out of step with current methods used to investigate these experimentally. Traditional methods of assessing speech discrimination, such as picture pointing, yield accuracy scores which may fail to detect subtle perceptual difficulties. This paper will…

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…

Studied developmental differences in 3- to 7-year-old children's preferences for tickling or cuddling stimulation. (JMB)