Adult observers are sensitive to the configuration of facial features within a face, able to distinguish between relative differences in feature spacing, and detecting deviations from typical facial appearance. How does the representation of the typical configuration of facial features develop? While there is a great deal of work describing…

Previous studies show that newborn infants and adults orient their attention preferentially toward human faces. However, the developmental changes of visual attention captured by face stimuli remain unclear, especially when an explicit top-down process is involved. We capitalized on a visual search paradigm to assess how the relative strength of…

The goal of this study was to explore whether viewing the speaker's articulatory gestures contributes to lexical access in children (ages 5-10) and in adults. We conducted a vowel monitoring task with words and pseudo-words in audio-only (AO) and audiovisual (AV) contexts with white noise masking the acoustic signal. The results indicated that…

Sensitivity to spacing information within faces improves with age and reaches maturity only at adolescence. In this study, we tested 6-16-year-old children's sensitivity to vertical spacing when the eyes or the mouth is the facial feature selectively manipulated. Despite the similar discriminability of these manipulations when they are embedded in…

Four groups of children (N=80; C.A. 6.6. to 12.5; M.A. 7.9 to 14.7) were tested for ability to reproduce five-element two- and three-dimensional patterns. Significant interaction and main effects were found. Three-dimensional pattern performance increased with age; all ages performed well on two-dimensional patterns. (Author/DB)

Results demonstrate that number can be abstracted from an array of elements in estimating. Estimation appears to be based on the perception of a higher order structure, and persons of 8 years and older are able to abstract the structure from an array of objects. Even 6-year-old children can be trained to estimate by abstracting number. (Author/RH)

Two studies investigated the effect of age on memory for visual and spatial information. Five to 10 year olds were asked to reconstruct a previously seen spatial arrangement of objects. The association between an object's identity and its location was weaker for younger than for older children. (LB)

Investigates the ability of Malawians ranging from 7 through 23 years of age to make judgements of the relative sizes and spatial locations of objects in photographic scenes with restricted cues to depth. All age groups responded with an accuracy significantly above chance. Exhibiting maximum scores, adults were significantly more accurate than…

The style of parenting of 100 children (mean age 11 years, 5 months) was established according to Baumrind's typology. Children were asked to indicate what they thought an adult would say to justify a moral rule in five different scenarios. Results indicated that parenting style did not relate to the number of justifications that children thought…

Recent work on the development of the perceptual information-seeking function of the hand in relation to its motor-executive function is reviewed. (PCB)

Factor analysis of correlations among the measures of recall clustering, free sorting, and recognition errors revealed significant convergent validity for consistent use of a semantic perceptual organization strategy in the three tasks. Ten-year-old, adult, and elderly adult subjects relied on a semantic strategy; four- and six-year-olds encoded…

Investigated 60 parents' perceptions of influence of their eldest child's (aged 4, 7, or 10 years) development and the extent to which these perceptions varied as a function of five factors. Cognitive and social development were significant variables for beliefs about influence. (RJC)

Examined the ability of children from 6 to 12 years of age to draw human figures and to reconstruct the drawing abilities they possessed at earlier ages. Found that diachronic thinking, or the ability to understand a present situation as a stage in an evolving process, developed with age. (MDM)

Describes two studies investigating the development of recursive thinking in 60 Dutch children five, seven, and nine years of age. The first study replicated earlier research employing a verbal production procedure. The second study used verbal comprehension procedures and concluded that development appears two years earlier than indicated by the…

This study examined the changes in children's social network and specific self-perceptions during the transition from elementary school to junior high school (JHS). The participants were 200 preadolescent children (104 girls, 96 boys). Children's self-perceptions (global self-worth, perceived academic competence, and perceived social acceptance)…