This study aims to examine the developmental changes in young children's perception. A matching completion task consisting of three geometric figures and one bird-like figure were completed by children 3-5 years of age ("N" = 99). The rotation effect, in which the correct response decreased with orientation (45°, 90° 135°, and 180°), was…

In simple rule-switching tests, 3- and 4-year-olds can follow each of two sorting rules but sometimes make perseverative errors when switching. Older children make few errors but respond slowly when switching. These age-related changes might reflect the maturation of executive functions (e.g., inhibition). However, they might also reflect…

Navigational and reaching spaces are known to involve different cognitive strategies and brain networks, whose development in humans is still debated. In fact, high-level spatial processing, including allocentric location encoding, is already available to very young children, but navigational strategies are not mature until late childhood. The…

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

One of the most extensively investigated topics in the adult memory literature, dual memory processes, has had virtually no impact on the study of early memory development. The authors remove the key obstacles to such research by formulating a trichotomous theory of recall that combines the traditional dual processes of recollection and…

The aim of the study was to investigate the developmental trajectory of error monitoring. For this purpose, children (age 7-8), young adolescents (age 13-14) and adults (age 23-24) performed a Go/No-Go task and were compared on overt reaction time (RT) performance and on event-related potentials (ERPs), thought to reflect error detection…

In a replication of an earlier study, the spellings produced by 47 learning disabled (LD) students (ages 7 to 11 years) were classified in terms of a hierarchy of spelling strategies presumed to result in conventional spelling. The developmental trends for the spelling strategies used by the LD Ss were compared to the trends previously observed…

Prior research (DeLoache, Uttal & Rosengren, 2004) has documented that 18- to 30-month-olds occasionally make scale errors: they attempt to fit their bodies into or onto miniature objects (e.g. a chair) that are far too small for them. The current study explores whether scale errors are limited to actions that directly involve the child's…

Argues that learning to spell is a developmental process and reviews research showing that errors made by poor spellers can indicate the point at which that development has broken down. Discusses some of the linguistic strategies students must acquire to become proficient spellers and offers teaching suggestions for helping students develop a…

In recent research, two qualitatively different classes of mental operations have been identified. The performance of one type of cognitive task requires attention, in the sense of mental effort, for its execution, while the second type can be performed automatically, independent of attentional control. Further research has shown that automatic…

A program of research was conducted to study transitions from preoperational to concrete operational forms of spatial imagery (area 1), to compare results from spatial imagery studies based on open-ended measures (such as drawings) with results based on reaction time measures (area 2), and to study anticipatory imagery in the contexts of memory…

Visual selective attention is the ability to attend to relevant visual information and ignore irrelevant stimuli. Little is known about its typical and atypical development in early childhood. Experiment 1 investigates typically developing toddlers' visual search for multiple targets on a touch-screen. Time to hit a target, distance between…