The current prospective cohort study investigated whether early perceptual abilities, measured at preschool age, could predict later intellectual abilities at school age in a group of 41 autistic (9 girls, 32 boys) and 57 neurotypical children (29 girls, 28 boys). More than 80% of the autistic children were considered minimally verbal.…

More than a century ago, Galton and Spearman suggested that there was a functional relationship between sensory discrimination ability and intelligence. Studies have since been able to confirm a close relationship between general discrimination ability (GDA) and IQ. The aim of the present study was to assess whether this strong relationship…

Bhatt and Quinn (2011) review evidence indicating that learning plays a powerful role in the development of perceptual organization, and provide a theoretical framework for studying this process. The fact that prominent researchers in diverse areas of cognitive development and adult cognition have commented on this paper (Aslin, 2011; Goldstone,…

This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence (MRC) with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2002) seminal work on MRC in mathematics and sciences as background, it aims to assess the relative importance children attribute to several criteria for representational adequacy…

This new text consists of parts of Bornstein and Lamb's Developmental Science, 6th edition along with new introductory material that as a whole provides a cutting edge and comprehensive overview of cognitive development. Each of the world-renowned contributors masterfully introduces the history and systems, methodologies, and measurement and…

The term synaesthesia has been applied to a range of different sensory-perceptual and cognitive experiences, yet how these experiences are related to each other is not well understood. Not only are there disparate types of synaesthesia, but even within types there are vast individual differences in the way that stimuli induce synaesthesia and in…

Five experiments involving children of 4-11 years investigated partonomic knowledge and its relation to the use of taxonomic organization. Results suggest that children are sensitive to parts of common objects and appear to be able to use this sensitivity to group objects in abstract, function-based, superordinate categories. (RJC)

Describes two experiments that assessed young children's understanding of the characteristic uncertainty in the physical nature of random phenomena as well as the unpredictability of outcomes. (HOD)

Explores longstanding inconsistencies in Piaget's account of development of spatial representation and perspective-taking. Examines Piaget's early writings and the findings of the original "three mountains" experiment. Concludes that Piaget's alternative theory is compatible with contemporary thinking and is important as a contributory…

Research in progress on some unresolved issues regarding the relationship of cognitive development and language acquisition is reported, especially the relationship between conservation of length and knowledge of relevant comparative dimensional adjectives. Much further investigation is recommended and possible educational implications are…

The primary purpose of this study was to determine empirically whether an individual's cognitive style differentially influences his hypothesizing behavior within a relatively simple information processing task. A characteristic of cognitive style explored is the manner in which an individual perceives and analyzes a stimulus configuration;…

Second and third graders and fifth and sixth graders were tested in a very large, unfamiliar environment to determine the relation of their knowledge of an abstract reference frame to performance on a spatial inference task. (HOD)

Examines the fallacies about the nature of abilities and learning and about the interaction between sense modalities which follow from the dichotomy in relation to explanations of spatial development in the blind. Suggests that interactions between cognitive and perceptual factors need to be considered to explain more adequately effects of sensory…

Subjects were Zambian elementary school children, ages 7-17, providing evidence of weight conservation behavior and those who did not; principal dependent variable was performance on locally-developed psychometric measures of reasoning ability. Very little connection was found between the conservation-status of the subjects and their performance…

Confirms a trend in an earlier study for high-contact Aboriginals to perform on classification tests at about the same level as white children in a similar environment, despite the markedly lower verbal intelligence quotient scores of Aboriginal children. (RJ)