The mature visual system condenses complex scenes into simple summary statistics (e.g., average size, location, orientation, etc.). However, children, often perform poorly on perceptual averaging tasks. Children's difficulties are typically thought to represent the suboptimal implementation of an adult-like strategy. This paper examines another…

Adults vary their haptic exploratory behavior reliably with variation both in the sensory input and in the task goals. Little is known about the development of these connections between perceptual goals and exploratory behaviors. A total of 36 children ages 3, 4, and 5 years and 20 adults completed a haptic intramodal match-to-sample task.…

We explored the perceptual structure of facial expressions of six basic emotions, varying systematically in intensity, in adults and children aged 7 and 14 years. Multidimensional scaling suggested that three- or four-dimensional structures were optimal for all groups. Two groups of adults demonstrated nearly identical structure, which had…

J. Kagan (2008) urges contemporary developmentalists to (a) be cautious when attributing conceptual knowledge to infants based on looking-time performance, (b) constrain their interpretation of infant performance with multiple methodologies, and (c) reconsider the possibility that qualitative development may be the path by which perceptual infants…

Rule use in perceptual classification was investigated in adults and in 4- to 12-year-old children. Two studies of performance on triad classification tasks with large samples (N=226 and N=328) are presented to (a) contrast theoretical predictions from the holistic-to-analytic-shift theory (Smith & Kemler, 1977) and the differential-sensitivity…

A series of three experiments was conducted to assess the comprehension of four types of cross-modal (synesthetic) similarities in children and adults. Both perceptual and verbal (metaphoric) modes were tested. (PCB)