First-order and advanced theory of mind (ToM and AToM), and their structures and relations were investigated in 229 children aged 5-8 years. ToM was assessed using 6 tasks from the first-order ToM scale, while AToM was measured using an 18-item battery (higher-order false-belief understanding; strange stories; faux pas test; eyes test;…

A number of authors have suggested that attention control may be a suitable target for cognitive training in children with autism spectrum disorder. This study provided the first evidence of the feasibility of such training using a battery of tasks intended to target visual attentional control in children with autism spectrum disorder within…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

Studies with infants show divergence between performance on theory of mind tasks depending on whether "direct" or "indirect" measures are used. It has been suggested that direct measures assess a flexible but cognitively demanding ability to reason about the minds of others, whereas indirect measures assess distinct processes…

The ability to extract visual word forms quickly and efficiently is essential for using reading as a tool for learning. We describe the first longitudinal fMRI study to chart individual changes in cortical sensitivity to written words as reading develops. We conducted four annual measurements of brain function and reading skills in a heterogeneous…

This study focuses on the development of face recognition in typically developing preschool- and school-aged children (aged 5 to 15 years old, "n" = 611, 336 girls). Social predictors include sex differences and own-sex bias. At younger ages, the development of face recognition was rapid and became more gradual as the age increased up…

The present research identifies an anomaly in sociocognitive development, whereby younger children (8 and 9 years) outperform their older counterparts (10 and 11 years) in a basic categorization task in which the acknowledgment of racial difference facilitates performance. Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral…

Two experiments investigated the role of kindergarten and elementary school children's spontaneous cognitive sets in pictorial discrimination learning. Data indicated that, in comparison to the behavior of older children, the behavior of kindergarteners is governed more by the perceptible than by the conceptual attributes of stimuli. (GO)

Twenty first and 20 fourth grade children were tested on perceptual tasks involving moving stimuli that did not touch. In these tables, one stimulus appeared, among adults, to cause the other to move. (MS)

Investigates whether procedural differences or developmental changes account for the ambiguous results obtained in previous research on the affective consequences of mere exposure to visual stimuli with 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children. (Author/ED)

Attempts to specify whether previously reported limitations on young children's full-report capacity lay in a smaller amount of available information, in a shorter trace duration of information in visual information storage (VIS), or in poorer coding of information into permanent storage. (Author/ED)

Subjects in grades 2, 6, and college were asked to sort 50 pictures according to several class labels, each with a functional equivalent. (ST)

Investigates kindergarteners, and third graders' ability to identify novel and repeated visual stimuli. A continuous recognition memory task technique is used. Examines children's ratings of confidence in their decisions by using standardized photographs of peers expressing varying degrees of certainty. (DP)

In this test for age-related effects of perceptual interference under different task conditions, 240 subjects, 60 each in kindergarten and grades 1 through 3, learned the positions of 5 cards upon each of which 3 stimulus attributes--a word, a color, and a shape--were presented in different descending orders. Two stimulus conditions were employed,…

This study was designed to investigate whether age differences in timesharing performance would be found if the baseline performance of younger and older children was experimentally equated. Two groups of twelve 8-year-olds and one group of twelve 13-year-olds participated. Each subject performed a compensatory tracking task and an auditory…