This study examined whether set-shifting ability for children with autism spectrum disorder without intellectual disability would be affected differentially by verbal or nonverbal feedback as the outcome of previous research tentatively suggests that verbal feedback may lead to slower set-shifting. Overall, 56 children participated (42 male; 14…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

Children's ability to recognize emotional expressions from faces and bodies develops during childhood. However, the low-level features that support accurate body emotion recognition during development have not been well characterized. This is in marked contrast to facial emotion recognition, which is known to depend upon specific spatial frequency…

Children acquiring languages with noun classes (grammatical gender) have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the…

What are the representations and learning mechanisms that underlie conceptual development? The present research provides evidence in favor of the claim that this process is guided by an early-emerging predisposition to think and learn about abstract kinds. Specifically, three studies (N=192) demonstrated that 4- to 7-year-old children have better…

The acquisition of complex motor, cognitive, and social skills, like playing a musical instrument or mastering sports or a language, is generally associated with implicit skill learning (SL). Although it is a general view that SL is most effective in childhood, and such skills are best acquired if learning starts early, this idea has rarely been…

Vision is one of the five senses. Being able to see gives tremendous access to learning about the world around--people's faces and the subtleties of expression, what different things look like and how big they are, and the physical environments, including approaching hazards. When a child has a visual impairment, it is cause for immediate…

This paper is the first of its series that studies the power children have in game-play and examines its implications for teaching and learning. As a start, the paper describes a framework of power based on a synthesis of various types of power underlined in literature. The paper then looks into the power issue through observation and interviews…

Current theories of category learning posit separate verbal and nonverbal learning systems. Past research suggests that the verbal system relies on verbal working memory and executive functioning and learns rule-defined categories; the nonverbal system does not rely on verbal working memory and learns non-rule-defined categories (E. M. Waldron…

We investigated procedural learning in 18 children with basal ganglia (BG) lesions or dysfunctions of various aetiologies, using a visuo-motor learning test, the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task, and a cognitive learning test, the Probabilistic Classification Learning (PCL) task. We compared patients with early (less than 1 year old, n=9), later…

This investigation tracked changes in categorical bias (i.e., placing objects belonging to the same spatial group closer together than they really are) while 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and adults were learning a set of locations. Participants learned the locations of 20 objects marked by dots on the floor of an open square box divided into…

The Sampling Organization and Recall Through Strategies (SORTS) test was administered to 87 educable mentally retarded (EMR) children (mean chronological age, 97 months; mean IQ, 70) and 31 nonretarded (NR) second grade children to determine Ss' characteristic grouping responses, the effects of various organizational strategies on recall and…

Describes the slot-filler model of taxonomic knowledge development in which preschoolers derive "slot-filler" categories from event schemas. Maintains that the model has received considerable support across methodologies, ages, and sociocultural contexts. Argues that Krackow and Gordon's theorizing and methods could not lead to reliable,…