Infant research is providing accumulating evidence that number-space mappings appear early in development. Here, a Posner cueing paradigm was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning the attentional bias induced by nonsymbolic numerical cues in 9-month-old infants (N = 32). Event-related potentials and saccadic reaction time were…

Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120…

Children perform worse than adults on tests of cognitive flexibility, which is a component of executive function. To assess what aspects of a cognitive flexibility task (cued switching) children have difficulty with, investigators tested where eye gaze diverged over age. Eye-tracking was used as a proxy for attention during the preparatory period…

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…

To what extent do children with autism (AD) versus typically developing children (TD) rely on attentional and intentional cues to learn words? Four experiments compared 17 AD children (M age = 5.08 years) with 17 language- and 17 mental-age-matched TD children (M ages = 2.57 and 3.12 years, respectively) on nonverbal enactment and word-learning…

Labels for toys were taught to 64 infants. In follow-in labeling, the experimenter labeled a toy at which infants were looking; in discrepant labeling, one at which they were not looking. Results revealed that infants learned follow-in labels and made no mapping errors after discrepant labeling. (BC)

This paper presents a model of infant visual recognition which proposes that an infant faced with a novel and a previously exposed target responds with one "look" consisting of a chain of 2 covert responses: (1) an attentional observing response to a dimension and (2) a fixation response to a cue. (Author/JMB)

These results provide a more precise attentional interpretation of both preference and pretraining effects. (Authors)

The visual short-term cued recall memory of 8-, 12-, and 16-month-olds was assessed in two experiments using an operant indirect delayed-reaction procedure. In each experiment, 12- and 16-month olds performed better than chance, whereas 8-month-old infants did not. (Author/DB)

The present study was designed to determine whether a reactivation procedure (consisting of the experimenter's manipulation of a previously experienced overhead crib mobile) would alleviate infant's poor retention after a 14-day interval. It is concluded that forgetting by young infants may result from failures in retrieval, and not failures in…

Results supported the expectations regarding field dependence-independence but failed to support those regarding sex differences. (Authors)

Study was designed to investigate the effects of color cues and of subject-employed strategies in the development of selective attention in a short-term memory task. (Authors)

Three studies examined children's understanding of looking behavior in revealing another's desired goal. Found that 6-year olds and adults, but not 4-year olds, consistently regarded prolonged looking as a more important cue than glancing or inadvertent touching of the protagonist's goal. Results suggest that development is characterized by…

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)

A computerized test of preparedness for effortful processing (alerting attention), response to orienting cues (orienting attention), and response to the interference of competing demands (executive attention) was administered to a diverse sample of 249 children (47% female, 4.96 to 7.27 years) to assess developmental properties and…