Remembering the past and envisioning the future rely on episodic memory which enables mental time travel. Studies in young adults indicate that past and future thinking share common cognitive and neural underpinnings. No imaging data is yet available in healthy aged subjects. Using fMRI, we scanned older subjects while they remembered personal…

Two studies examined the hypothesis that children rely on name representations, often indexed by shape, in their semantic representations. Results suggest that, although shape plays an important role in children's early naming, other factors are also important, including the mental state of the picture's creator (whether intentional or not).…

We studied how category typicality and out-of-category relatedness affect speeded category verification (vote ''yes'' if pictured object is clothing) in typically developing 4- to 14-year-olds and adults. Stimuli were typical and atypical category objects (e.g., pants, glove) and related and unrelated out-of-category objects (e.g., necklace,…

Four studies examined the influence of essentialist information such as internal properties and perceptual similarity on 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds' interpretations of labels. Results suggested that children have essentialist beliefs about animals, but not about artifacts, and that these beliefs interact with children's assumptions about word meaning…

Two tasks of word identification were proposed to children in their last year of upper preschool classes. The results show that identification is not based on an holistic processing but on an analytic one: some letters are enough, especially the first ones. Moreover, their order does not matter. During this period where reading is visuo-semantic…

In this study, 50 infants (15 to 18 months of age) were shown four different film sets in an effort to determine (1) whether infants can perceive action role reversals between an actor and recipient of the action when the direction of the action is ruled out as a cue and (2) whether infants consider only animate objects to be potential…

Discusses the audio and video-recorded longitudinal data from six infants with varying degrees of vision. The findings indicate that there are basic differences in early language, which appear to reflect differences in cognitive development. (SL)

The work described in this report is aimed at understanding the role of cognitive development, especially perceptual development, in the reading process and its acquisition. The papers included describe: (1) a theory of perceptual learning, (2) an investigation of the perception of morphological information, (3) the role of categorical semantic…

A study explored working memory (WM) capacity, WM task requirements, as well as effects between WM, skills, knowledge base, and intelligence in adults with mental retardation and children aged 3-6 years. Adults were better on measures reflecting skills and knowledge base. Children performed better in phonological and visuo-spatial WM tasks.…