Developmental science has experienced a vivid debate on whether young children prioritize goals over means in their prediction of others' actions. Influential developmental theories highlight the role of goal objects for action understanding. Yet, recent infant studies report evidence for the opposite. The empirical evidence is therefore…

Children's abilities to regulate their behaviors are critical for learning and development, yet researchers lack an objective, precise method for assessing children's behavioral regulation in their everyday environments such as their classrooms. This study tested a sensor-based approach to assess preschool children's behavioral regulation…

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal…

Movement is prospective. It structures self-generated engagement with objects and social partners and is fundamental to children's learning and development. In autistic children, previous reports of differences in movement kinematics compared to neurotypical peers suggest that its prospective organisation might be disrupted. Here, we employed a…

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…

Self-propelled motion is a powerful cue that conveys information that an object is animate. In this case, animate refers to an entity's capacity to initiate motion without an applied external force. Sensitivity to this motion cue is present in infants that are a few months old, but whether this sensitivity is experience-dependent or is already…

How do infants plan and guide locomotion under challenging conditions? This experiment investigated the real-time process of visual and haptic exploration in 14-month-old infants as they decided whether and how to walk over challenging terrain--a series of bridges varying in width. Infants' direction of gaze was recorded with a head-mounted eye…

Using landmarks and other scene features to recall locations from new viewpoints is a critical skill in spatial cognition. In an immersive virtual reality task, we asked children 3.5-4.5 years old to remember the location of a target using various cues. On some trials they could use information from their own self-motion. On some trials they could…

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…

Patients deprived of visual experience during infancy by dense bilateral congenital cataracts later show marked deficits in the perception of global motion (dorsal visual stream) and global form (ventral visual stream). We expected that they would also show marked deficits in sensitivity to biological motion, which is normally processed in the…

We used a staircase procedure to test sensitivity to (1) global motion in random-dot kinematograms moving at 4 degrees and 18 degrees s[superscript -1] and (2) biological motion. Thresholds were defined as (1) the minimum percentage of signal dots (i.e. the maximum percentage of noise dots) necessary for accurate discrimination of upward versus…

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…

Recent evidence suggests those with autism may be generally impaired in visual motion perception. To examine this, we investigated both coherent and biological motion processing in adolescents with autism employing both psychophysical and fMRI methods. Those with autism performed as well as matched controls during coherent motion perception but…

Pointing, like eye gaze, is a deictic gesture that can be used to orient the attention of another person towards an object or an event. Previous research suggests that infants first begin to follow a pointing gesture between 10 and 13 months of age. We investigated whether sensitivity to pointing could be seen at younger ages employing a technique…