The benefits of active music participation and training for cognitive development have been evidenced in multiple studies, with this link leveraged in music therapy approaches with clinical populations. Although music, rhythm, and movement activities are widely integrated into children's play and early education, few studies have systematically…

Spatial processing of numbers has emerged as one of the basic properties of humans' mathematical thinking. However, how and when number-space relations develop is a highly contested issue. One dominant view has been that a link between numbers and left/right spatial directions is constructed based on directional experience associated with reading…

Perception of mechanical (i.e. physical) causality, in terms of a cause-effect relationship between two motion events, appears to be a powerful mechanism in our daily experience. In spite of a growing interest in the earliest causal representations, the role of experience in the origin of this sensitivity is still a matter of dispute. Here, we…

The shadows cast by moving objects enable human adults and infants to infer the motion trajectories of objects. Nonhuman animals must also be able to discriminate between objects and their shadows and infer the spatial layout of objects from cast shadows. However, the evolutionary and comparative developmental origins of sensitivity to cast…