Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Preterm birth (<37 gestational weeks) is associated with long-term risks for health and neurodevelopment, but recently, studies have also started exploring how preterm birth affects early language development in the 1st year of life. Because the timing and quality of auditory and visual input is very different for preterm versus full-term…

Recent advances in understanding visual working memory, the limited information held in mind for use in ongoing processing, are extended here to examine auditory working memory development. Research with arrays of visual objects has shown how to distinguish the capacity, in terms of the "number" of objects retained, from the…

Recent studies suggest that infants' audiovisual speech perception is influenced by articulatory experience (Mugitani et al., 2008; Yeung & Werker, 2013). The current study extends these findings by testing if infants' emerging ability to produce native sounds in babbling impacts their audiovisual speech perception. We tested 44 6-month-olds…

Adults across cultures speak to infants in a specific infant-directed manner. We asked whether infants use this manner of speech (infant- or adult-directed) to guide their subsequent visual preferences for social partners. We found that 5-month-old infants encode an individuals' use of infant-directed speech and adult-directed speech, and use this…

Two experiments were used to investigate the scope of imitation by testing whether 36-month-olds can learn to produce a categorization strategy through observation. After witnessing an adult sort a set of objects by a visible property (their color; Experiment 1) or a nonvisible property (the particular sounds produced when the objects were shaken;…

Infants five and seven months of age participated in two studies in which two filmed facial expressions were presented with a single vocal expression characteristic of one of the facial expressions. Seven- , but not five-month-olds, increased their fixation to a facial expression when it was sound-specified. Preferences for a particular expression…

Infants looked at visual displays of two or three items while listening to auditory sequences of two or three sounds. When the rate and duration of sounds were constant, infants looked longer at the visual display that was numerically equivalent to the auditory sequence. When the rate and duration of sounds varied, infants showed no preference for…

Auditory-visual pattern equivalence and temporal-spatial equivalence of 72 children of 7-17 years were examined. Data indicated that aspects of intersensory integration were still developing between the ages of 13 and 17. Accuracy in performance increased with age for intra- and intersensory matching. (RH)

Applying optimal stimulation theory, the present study explored the development of sustained attention as a dynamic process. It examined the interaction of modality and temperament over time in children and adults. Second-grade children and college-aged adults performed auditory and visual vigilance tasks. Using the Carey temperament…

To investigate sensory dominance in early development, a series of studies examined six-month-old infants' processing of multisensory stimulus compounds. Findings indicated that infants discriminated changes in the temporal characteristics of the auditory component but not in the visual component. This and other findings suggested that auditory…

Involving 10-month-old infants, a series of studies examined responses to temporally modulated compound auditory-visual stimuli. Findings indicated that, although the auditory modality can dominate the visual modality at 10 months of age, the visual modality can process temporal information when the temporal relationship of the information in the…

Development of the relation between skills of visual and auditory pattern classification was studied at the second grade, sixth grade, and adult age levels using visual and auditory representations of the same abstract information. Results showed evidence of common processing of pattern class structure for the modalities, patterns, prototypes, and…