The aim of this study was to analyze the development of Perceptual Inhibition (PI) and Selective Visual Attention (SVA) across lifespan, identifying key moments of change in the direction of development. A total of 810 Argentinian participants, ranging from 6-80 years, were included. The results revealed that PI and SVA followed similar patterns,…

Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here,…

Observers experience complex patterns of visual motion in daily life due to their own movements through space, the movement of objects, and the geometry of surfaces in the visible world. Motion information shapes behavior and brain activity beginning in infancy. And yet most prior behavioral research has focused on how children process only one…

Letter production through handwriting creates visual experiences that may be important for the development of visual letter perception. We sought to better understand the neural responses to different visual percepts created during handwriting at different levels of experience. Three groups of participants, younger children, older children, and…

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…

Adults use vision to perceive low-fidelity speech; yet how children acquire this ability is not well understood. The literature indicates that children show reduced sensitivity to visual speech from kindergarten to adolescence. We hypothesized that this pattern reflects the effects of complex tasks and a growth period with harder-to-utilize…

Age-related change in processing speed has been linked directly to increases in reasoning as well as indirectly via increases in the capacity of working memory (WM). Most of the evidence linking change in speed to reasoning has come from cross-sectional research; in this article we present the findings from a 2½-year longitudinal study of 277 6-…

This study used the modality shift experiment, a relatively simple reaction time measure to visual and auditory stimuli, to examine attentional shifting within and across modalities in 33 children and 42 adults with high-functioning autism as compared to matched numbers of age- and ability-matched typical controls. An exaggerated "modality shift…

Background: The purpose of the current cross-sectional study was to examine the developmental progression in working memory (WM) between the ages of 9 and 16 years in a large sample of children with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities (MBID). Baddeley's influential WM model was used as a theoretical framework. Furthermore, the…

Adults are experts at recognizing faces but there is controversy about how this ability develops with age. We assessed 6- to 12-year-olds and adults using a digitized version of the Benton Face Recognition Test, a sensitive tool for assessing face perception abilities. Children's response times for correct responses did not decrease between ages 6…

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…

Three experiments assessed the development of children's part and configural (part-relational) processing in object recognition during adolescence. In total, 312 school children aged 7-16 years and 80 adults were tested in 3-alternative forced choice (3-AFC) tasks. They judged the correct appearance of upright and inverted presented familiar…

The relations among various spatial and mathematics skills were assessed in a cross-sectional study of 854 children from kindergarten, third, and sixth grades (i.e., 5 to 13 years of age). Children completed a battery of spatial mathematics tests and their scores were submitted to exploratory factor analyses both within and across domains. In the…

Preschoolers who explore objects haptically often fail to recognize those objects in subsequent visual tests. This suggests that children may represent qualitatively different information in vision and haptics and/or that children's haptic perception may be poor. In this study, 72 children (2 1/2-5 years of age) and 20 adults explored unfamiliar…

Recent findings suggest that children with autism may be impaired in the perception of biological motion from moving point-light displays. Some children with autism also have abnormally high motion coherence thresholds. In the current study we tested a group of children with autism and a group of typically developing children aged 5 to 12 years of…