Available evidence indicates that experience with one face from a specific age group improves face-processing abilities if acquired within the first 3 years of life but not in adulthood. In the current study, we tested whether the effects of early experience endure at age 6 and whether the first 3 years of life are a sensitive period for the…

The shared features that characterize the noun categories that young children learn first are a formative basis of the human category system. To investigate the potential categorical information contained in the features of early-learned nouns, we examine the graph-theoretic properties of noun-feature networks. The networks are built from the…

Evidence suggests that visual processing is divided into the dorsal ("how") and ventral ("what") streams. We examined the normal development of these streams and their breakdown under neurological deficit by comparing performance of normally developing children and Williams syndrome individuals on two tasks: a visually guided action ("how") task,…

Changes in magnitude of Muller-Lyer illusion lines between forks and arrows as a function of age were studied in 48 hyperactive and 48 nonhyperactive boys (six-nine years old).

Observers aged six to 24 years estimated distances between elements in patterns illustrating Gestalt grouping principles of proximity, similarity, closure, and good continuation. Magnitude of distance distortions decreased significantly with age, suggesting that perceptual development includes improving ability to disregard Gestalt groupings when…

Examined which of the attentional operations underlying exogenous orienting (disengaging, shifting, and/or engaging) improves with age in children from 6 to 14 years old. Found that disengaging attention alone distinguished between younger and older children's performance, regardless of whether attention alone or attention and associated sensory…

It is proposed here that adults process orientation information at different levels and that these levels correspond to developmental stages in the coding of orientation in childhood. (Author)

Two studies exposed children and adults to an illusion created by perceptual adaptation, in which subjects perceived two identical bottles, held simultaneously in a different hand, as being different in weight. Feedback and repeated trials led older children and adults to improve performance in determining correct weights. The role of feedback,…

This book contains a collection of current research in the development of speech perception and perceptual learning. The collection integrates research involving infants, young children, and adults, and explores systematically how adult perceptual abilities develop from early infant capabilities, focusing particularly on the nature of transitional…

The responses of 108 children, aged five through nine, to the question, "What is reading?" were analyzed to determine whether there were age-related trends toward more mature and structurally more complex definitions of reading and whether a relationship existed between reading skill and the ability to formulate a definition of reading. The…

Competence in action perception seems to be achieved very early in life. Because research has indicated that competent perceivers of action must be able to discriminate breakpoints in behavior, then recognition memory for breakpoints should be superior to that for nonbreakpoints at all ages where competence in action perception exists. Two studies…

The study reported in this paper traces the nature of the changes which take place as the child gradually acquires perspective-taking skills. The results indicate that at first the young child can correctly represent only the location of the object nearest another observer; later, he can correctly represent a before-behind relationship between…

Examines the reactions of children in grades 3-4, 7-8, and 11-12 to boys and girls whose behavior was either masculine-stereotyped or feminine-stereotyped along the dimensions of steadiness/excitability, adventurousness/timidity, and rudeness/politeness. (Author/HOD)

A study is reported in which subjects aged 8 - 18 years made magnitude estimations of height for targets whose height and distance from them varied. For distances up to 15m, and heights from 5 to 50 cm, size constancy prevailed at all ages. (MS)

In this study of sensitivity to viewpoint, children between the ages of 6 and 14 years were asked to draw an L-shaped array of 3 cubes from 1 of 3 views. At every age, children showed sensitivity to their view in the sense that there were consistent differences between the drawings produced in the three viewing conditions. (SH)