This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

Previous research has shown that when learning categories, adults and young children allocate attention differently. Adults tend to attend selectively, focusing primarily on the most relevant information, whereas young children tend to distribute their attention broadly. Although selective attention is useful in many situations, it also has costs.…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Much research has focused on the expression of voluntary motion (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000). The present study contributes to this body of research by comparing how children (three to ten years) and adults narrated short, animated cartoons in English and German (SATELLITE-FRAMED languages) vs. French (VERB-FRAMED). The cartoons showed agents…

Numerous studies have tried to identify the core deficit of developmental dyscalculia (DD), mainly by assessing a possible deficit of the mental representation of numerical magnitude. Research in healthy adults has shown that numerosity, duration, and space share a partly common system of magnitude processing and representation. However, in DD,…

Representations of social categories help us make sense of the social world, supporting predictions and explanations about groups and individuals. In an experiment with 156 participants, we explore whether children and adults are able to understand category-property associations (such as the association between "girls" and "liking…

Purpose: Research on language planning in adult stuttering is relatively sparse and offers diverging arguments about a potential causative relationship between semantic and phonological encoding and fluency breakdowns. This study further investigated semantic and phonological encoding efficiency in adults who stutter (AWS) by means of silent…

This study investigates the acquisition of integrated object manipulation and categorization abilities through a series of experiments in which human adults and artificial agents were asked to learn to manipulate two-dimensional objects that varied in shape, color, weight, and color intensity. The analysis of the obtained results and the…

In comparison to typically developing (TD) individuals, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) appear to be worse in the fast extraction of the global meaning of a situation or picture. Ultra-rapid categorization [paradigm developed by Thorpe et al. ("Nature" 381:520-522, 1996)] involves such global information processing. We…

One important function of categories is to permit rich inductive inferences. Prior work shows that children use category labels to guide their inductive inferences. However, there are competing theories to explain this phenomenon, differing in the roles attributed to conceptual information vs. perceptual similarity. Seven experiments with 4- to…

The Vygotsky Blocks Test assesses problem-solving styles within a theoretical framework for the development of higher mental processes devised by Vygotsky. Because both the theory and the associated test situate cognitive development within the child's social and linguistic context, they address conceptual issues around the developmental relation…

Previous research has demonstrated that adults are successful at visually tracking rigidly moving items, but experience great difficulties when tracking substance-like "pouring" items. Using a comparative approach, we investigated whether the presence/absence of the grammatical count-mass distinction influences adults and children's…

In this article we report on listener categorization of meaningful environmental sounds. A starting point for this study was the phenomenological taxonomy proposed by Gaver (1993b). In the first experimental study, 15 participants classified 60 environmental sounds and indicated the properties shared by the sounds in each class. In a second…

Two experiments examined processes underlying cognitive inflexibility in set-shifting tasks typically used to assess the development of executive function in children. Adult participants performed a Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST) that requires shifting from categorizing by one dimension (e.g., color) to categorizing by a second orthogonal…

Three alternative mechanisms for age-related decline in memory search have been proposed, which result from either reduced processing speed (global slowing hypothesis), overpersistence on categories (cluster-switching hypothesis), or the inability to maintain focus on local cues related to a decline in working memory (cue-maintenance hypothesis).…