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…

Numerous studies have established that visual working memory has a limited capacity that increases during childhood. However, debate continues over the source of capacity limits and its developmental increase. Simmering (2008) adapted a computational model of spatial cognitive development, the Dynamic Field Theory, to explain not only the source…

This work is an attempt to give a unified theory in response to two questions. The first question arises in the philosophy of mind: what is the mechanism by which we think of objects in the world? The second is a question in the philosophy of language: what is the mechanism by which we speak of them? These are questions that some have treated…

Exemplar-similarity models such as the exemplar-based random walk (EBRW) model (Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997b) were designed to provide a formal account of multidimensional classification choice probabilities and response times (RTs). At the same time, a recurring theme has been to use exemplar models to account for old-new item recognition and to…

Adults have little difficulty perceiving objects as complete despite occlusion, but newborn infants perceive moving partly occluded objects solely in terms of visible surfaces. The developmental mechanisms leading to perceptual completion have never been adequately explained. Here, the authors examine the potential contributions of oculomotor…

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…

Time perception is important for many aspects of human behavior, and a large literature documents that adults represent intervals and that their ability to discriminate temporal intervals is ratio dependent. Here we replicate a recent study by vanMarle and Wynn (2006 ) that used the visual habituation paradigm and demonstrated that temporal…

An experiment was performed to show that infants perceive auditory and visual stimuli within a common space and that they perceive the sound as an attribute of the visual object. Subjects were 22 infants aged 3 to 5 months. Each infant was presented with a toy that moved in a small arc from side to side of a small window at the rate of one arc per…

Two experiments explored the existence and the development of relations between action representations and object representations. A priming paradigm was used in which participants viewed an action pantomime followed by the picture of a tool, the tool being either associated or unassociated with the preceding action. Overall, we observed that the…

A necessary condition for studying cognitive images of environments is an appropriate method to define and measure these. Using a sample of students in Bristol, the Repertory Grid method was used to measure images of the retailing environment. The empirical results are discussed and possible future research is outlined. (BT)

THE NATURE OF COMPREHENSION IS DEFINED AND CLARIFIED. THE LITERATURE IS SURVEYED TO SHOW THAT THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONCEPTS IS IMPORTANT IN INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITIES. IT IS POINTED OUT THAT CONCEPTS ARE BUILT FROM PERCEPTS, IMAGES, SENSATION, AND MEMORIES, AND THAT THE STEPS WHICH ARE EMPLOYED AS CONCEPTS ARE BUILT AND REFINED AND INCLUDE PERCEIVING,…

Two conflicting developmental accounts of how mental states are used in evaluating actors were tested by varying actors' intentionality, foreknowledge of outcome, and the values of motive and outcome. Findings suggested that children use intentionality before knowledge in judgments of action sequences and that actor's foreknowledge of an outcome…

Analyzes the research strategies, stimuli, subjects, statistical strategies, and relative variables in 34 empirical studies on children's representation of three-dimensional objects. The studies fell into three categories: children's representation of spatial relationships within an object, between two objects, and studies that included both. (MJP)

Discusses the relationship between the person learning a foreign language, the methodology employed, and the environment using the paradigms of T. Parsons. Notes that the functional method has adapted some of these functions and suggests ways to incorporate the others. (AMH)

Much of what psychologists know about infant perception and cognition is based on habituation, but the process itself is still poorly understood. Here the authors offer a dynamic field model of infant visual habituation, which simulates the known features of habituation, including familiarity and novelty effects, stimulus intensity effects, and…