How does one assess developmental change when the measures themselves change with development? Most developmental studies of word learning use either looking (infants) or pointing (preschoolers and older). With little empirical evidence of the relationship between the two measures, developmental change is difficult to assess. This paper analyzes…

The effects of rewards on executive function (EF) reflect bidirectional interactions among motivational and executive systems that vary with age and temperament. However, methodological limitations hinder understanding of the precise influences of incentives on early EF, including the role of reward sensitivity. In this within-subjects study,…

Attention control abilities are relevant for learning success. Little is known about the development of audio-visual attention in early childhood. Four groups of children between the ages of 4 and 10 years and adults performed an audio-visual distraction paradigm (N = 106). Multilevel analyses revealed increased reaction times in a visual…

Infant research is providing accumulating evidence that number-space mappings appear early in development. Here, a Posner cueing paradigm was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning the attentional bias induced by nonsymbolic numerical cues in 9-month-old infants (N = 32). Event-related potentials and saccadic reaction time were…

This study investigated the changing relation between emotion and inhibitory control during adolescence. One hundred participants between 11 and 25 years of age performed a go-nogo task in which task-relevant stimuli (letters) were presented at the center of large task-irrelevant images depicting negative, positive, or neutral scenes selected from…

Examined the effects of an audiovisual distractor on the visual attention paid to TV by preschool children characterized as distractible. The effectiveness of an audiovisual distractor eliciting a head turn from the TV was diminished when TV viewing had been maintained for at least 15 seconds. (PCB)

Infants, preschoolers, and adults were tested to determine the shortest time interval at which they would respond to the precedence effect, an auditory phenomenon produced by presenting the same sound through two loudspeakers with the input to one loudspeaker delayed in relation to the other. Results revealed developmental differences in threshold…

Paper reports some definite differences in response latencies that clearly seem to reflect the existence of racial awareness in the white, second-grade children who served as Ss. (Author)

Results support the contention that infant attention should be divided into separate attention-getting and attention-holding processes. (Author)

A study to determine whether the differential development of conceptual tempo can predict preferences. Conceptual tempo predicted preferences in color-form sorting among 67 children ranging in age from 44 to 65 months. (WY)

Second-grade children, third-grade children, and adults judged whether pictures were members of a positive or negative memory set while trying to ignore irrelevant words printed inside the pictures. (JMB)

Investigated whether individual and developmental differences in look duration were correlated with latency to disengage fixation from a visual stimulus for 3- and 4-month olds. Found that look duration was correlated with disengagement latency. Three-month olds showed slower latencies than 4-month olds. Long-looking infants showed greater…

Purpose of this study was to test the adequacy of the serial habituation hypothesis as an account of the infant's perceptual commerce with visual stimuli. (Author)