A visual oddball paradigm was used to investigate whether children with high functioning autism had difficulty detecting mutual gaze under experimental conditions. Findings revealed that children with autism were no better at detecting direct gaze than at detecting averted gaze, unlike normal children. Findings suggest that the lack of ability to…

Investigated the relative effects of developmental level and domain-specific knowledge on 4- to 9-year-olds' ability to identify and make similarity decisions about objects based on haptic or tactile information. Found that older children explored models more exhaustively, found more differentiating features, and made fewer errors than younger…

Examined visual search for compound patterns in 6-, 8-, 10-, and 22-year-olds. Found large improvements with age in search rate for long-range targets; search rate for short-range targets was fairly constant across age. This pattern held regardless of ease of perceptual access to target, supporting the hypothesis of different processes involved at…

Examined in two studies the moderating effect of perceptual load on visual selective attention. Found that children's performance was as efficient as adults' under conditions of high but not low loads, suggesting that early selection engages rapidly maturing neural systems and late selection engages later-maturing systems. The onset of early…

Measured nonword reading, exception word reading, and performance with Ternus apparent movement displays (the perception of which is believed to depend upon the magnocellular and parvocellular pathways) in dyslexic children and children without reading difficulties. Found that Ternus task performance was related to nonword reading ability but not…

Three experiments examined development of perceptual causality in 3- to 9-year-olds. Findings indicated that participants of all ages assigned contact events (A moves toward B, which moves upon contact) to the physical domain and non-contact events (B moves before contact) to the psychological domain. Participants chose causality more often for…

Tested in two studies 4- to 7-year-olds' face recognition by manipulating the faces' configural and featural information. Found that even with only a single 5-second exposure, most children could use configural and featural cues to make identity judgments. Repeated exposure and feedback improved others' performance. Even proficient memories were…

Examined degree to which analytic and holistic modes of processing play a role in children's and adults' categorization of faces. Found a developmental trend from analytic to holistic processing and an effect of face inversion with increasing age. Seven-year-olds processed faces comparably to nonfacial visual stimuli, whereas a growing proportion…

Investigated 7-year-olds', 9-year-olds', and adults' ability to classify children's and adults' faces by sex using only biological based internal facial structure. Found that participants categorized adult faces by sex at accuracy levels varying from just above chance (7-year-olds) to nearly perfect (adults). All groups were less accurate for…

Two experiments examined developmental changes in reasoning about intensive quantities--predicting mixture intensity of pairs of liquids with different intensities of red color. Results showed that cognitive averaging in this domain developed late and slowly. Predominating up to 12 years was an extensivity bias, a strong tendency to use rules that…

Compared differences in the Bender-Gestalt mean error scores of 1,938 Black, Hispanic, and White children. Performed a two-way between groups' unweighted means ANOVA on the error scores for the seven age groups and for the three ethnic groups. Significant differences were found for both main effects. (Author)

Three experiments obtained same-different judgments from children and adults to trace normal development of local and global processing of hierarchical visual forms. Findings indicated that reaction time was faster on global trials than local trials; bias was stronger in children and diminished to adult levels between ages 10 and 14. Reaction time…