Infant responses to adult-defined unattractive male body shapes versus attractive male body shapes were assessed using visual preference and habituation procedures. Looking behavior indicated that 9-month-olds have a preference for unattractive male body shapes over attractive ones; however, this preference is demonstrated only when head…

The speed of a moving object is a critical variable that factors into actions such as crossing a street and catching a ball. However, it is not clear when the ability to discriminate between different speeds develops. Here, we investigated speed discrimination in 6- and 10-month-old infants using a habituation paradigm showing infants events of a…

Two experiments (N=136) studied how 4- to 6-month-olds perceive a simple schematic event, seen as goal-directed action and reaction from 3 years of age. In our causal reaction event, a red square moved toward a blue square, stopping prior to contact. Blue began to move away before red stopped, so that both briefly moved simultaneously at a…

The role of temporal synchrony and syllable distinctiveness in preverbal infants' learning of word-object relations was investigated. In Experiment 1, 7- and 8-month-olds (N=64) were habituated under conditions where two "similar-sounding" syllables, /tah/ and /gah/, were spoken simultaneously with the motions of one of two sets of…

A set of studies examined infant categorization of the orientation of visual stimuli by establishing a categorization function for the orientation continuum; attempted to determine a perceptual boundary between "oblique" and "vertical"; and explored the relationship between discrimination abilities and the perceptual boundary.…

Studies of orientation perception in infants and children have revealed an "oblique effect," that is, a performance advantage for tasks involving horizontal and vertical stimulus orientations compared with tasks involving oblique orientations. The two studies reported support the hypothesis that oblique stimulus orientations are treated…

Four experiments with the habituation procedure investigated 14-22-month-olds' ability to attend to correlations between static and dynamic features embedded in a category context. In Experiment 1, infants were habituated to four objects that exhibited invariant relations between moving features and motion trajectory. Results revealed that…

In 5 experiments, 10 month olds were habituated to exemplars of a form category and tested for categorization in paired-comparison trials involving in-category versus out-of-category stimuli. Results suggest infants' internal representation for category will not include stimulus dimension not varied in exemplars from which the category was…

Investigated how different contexts for learning affect the development of memory-enhancing strategies in children. Subjects were children four to seven years old. Results indicated that the number of items recalled in the lesson condition was significantly greater than in the game condition, and the grade effect was also significant. (MOK)

Reports on four experiments on pattern perception in four-month-old infants. The first experiment examined preference for patterns varying in structure; the second examined encoding patterns from different subset sizes; and the last two experiments examined changes in the size, position, and orientation of the habituation pattern. (HOD)

Three experiments investigated development of mechanisms of selective attention in 60 second graders. Results demonstrated that the ability to process automatically irrelevant stimuli and the habituation mechanisms of attention are observable by grade two, but the inhibitory mechanism was not always evident at this stage. (RJC)

Two experiments examined whether infants are sensitive to holistic combinations of line junctions in 2-D images that adults use to derive overall 3-D structure. Results suggested that 3-month-olds are sensitive to holistic combinations of line junctions that adults use to derive 3-D information but also selectively attend to these 3-D cues in…

Investigated 3-month-olds' categorization of animals and vehicles based on static and dynamic attributes. Found that regardless of viewing static or dynamic displays, infants showed habituation to varying exemplars from the same category, dishabituated to an exemplar from a novel category, and showed a novelty preference for a novel-category…

Newborns were habituated to white squares of varying size and luminance and retested with colored squares for recovery of habituation. Newborns could discriminate yellow-green from white in large squares, but not in small squares. They could not discriminate blue, blue-green, or purple from white. Results suggest newborns have little…

Tested the ability of 3.5-month-old infants to detect audiovisual relations. Results demonstrated infants' visual recovery to changes in temporal synchrony of sight and sound and in composition of objects. Infants did not demonstrate visual recovery to changes in the relationship between pitch and color or shape. (BC)