Young children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size--they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children's action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional…

Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated…

Although infants begin learning about their environment before they are born, little is known about how the infant brain changes during learning. Here, we take the initial steps in documenting how the neural responses in the brain change as infants learn to associate audio and visual stimuli. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNRIS) to…

As mindfulness practices become more widely implemented in schools, they are attracting both keen interest and strong criticism. It is important that mindfulness-based programs adhere to sound child development principles, be aligned with the neuroscience of stress, be integrated in a holistic manner by teachers throughout the school day, and…

We recently proposed a multi-channel, image-filtering model for simulating the development of visual selective attention in young infants (Schlesinger, Amso & Johnson, 2007). The model not only captures the performance of 3-month-olds on a visual search task, but also implicates two cortical regions that may play a role in the development of…

Pattern perception and organization are critical functions of the visual cognition system. Many organizational processes are available early in life, such that infants as young 3 months of age are able to readily utilize a variety of cues to organize visual patterns. However, other processes are not readily evident in young infants, and their…

The sensitivity of size perception to context has been used to distinguish between "vision for action" and "vision for perception", and to study cultural, psychopathological, and developmental differences in perception. The status of that evidence is much debated, however. Here we use a rigorous double dissociation paradigm based on the Ebbinghaus…

Interesting systems, whether biological or artificial, develop. Starting from some initial conditions, they respond to environmental changes, and continuously improve their capabilities. Developmental psychologists have dedicated significant effort to studying the developmental progression of infant imitation skills, because imitation underlies…

Prior work suggests that active experience affects infants' understanding of simple actions. The present studies compared the impact of active and observational experience on infants' ability to identify the goal of a novel tool-use event. Infants either received active training and practice in using a cane to retrieve an out-of-reach toy or had…

Intersensory redundancy can facilitate animal and human behavior in areas as diverse as rhythm discrimination, signal detection, orienting responses, maternal call learning, and associative learning. In the realm of numerical development, infants show similar sensitivity to numerical differences in both the visual and auditory modalities. Using a…

Models of stuttering and delayed auditory feedback propose that, in these conditions, the rhythmic structure of fluent speech prespecifing the intervals between vowels of stressed syllables is lacking and that auditory perception of vowels of stressed syllables is predicted incorrectly. A model regarding onset of stuttering in children is also…

Twenty-four four-year-old children were given a perceptual task (color matching), a memory task (color recognition), and a verbal task (color naming). The relation between the children's performance on the nonverbal and verbal tasks was demonstrated by the fact that nearly all the matching and recognition responses, even when incorrect, were from…

This study (with 16 children and 11 adults) examined an alternative to the Developmental Weighting Shift model which explains age-related differences in labeling of speech stimuli as due to increasing experience with word-internal structure. Findings rejected the alternative model, that changes in perceptual weighting strategies are due to…

Some research indicates that a number of children understand vision as an outreaching of the sense, and that they are the originator of the process (Eaton, Anderson, & Smith, 1983; Guesne, 1985). The children draw arrows or rays that point out of the eyes, sometimes returning to the head, and write that vision involves the eyes seeing or…