We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and non-White infants (N = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a singleton) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and "pops out" in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead…

This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

This study explores how 7-month-old infants categorize graphical images varying in basic perceptual features by using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) task. Most participants were Caucasian and their parents had a higher education, but the family's socioeconomic background was mixed. Experiment 1 (N = 23) tested brain responses to…

Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern…

Recent studies have found that infants show relational learning in the first year. Like older children, they can abstract relations such as "same" or "different" across a series of exemplars. For older children, language has a major impact on relational learning: labeling a shared relation facilitates learning, while labeling…

Assessing children's working memory capacity (WMC) can be challenging for a variety of reasons, including the rapid increase in WMC across early childhood. Here, we developed and piloted an adapted WMC task, which involved minimal equipment, could be performed rapidly, and did not rely on verbal production ability (to facilitate the use of the…

Since birth, infants develop the ability to perceive a wide range of intersensory relations among various kinds of amodal temporal information. This study addresses the development of the ability to perceive duration-based intersensory relations. Three groups of infants, four, seven and 10 months old, participated in two trials of an intersensory…

The purpose of this study was to investigate sub-lexical segmentation in Spanish-speaking children based on the perception of regular syllables (pseudomorphemes), as well as their association with a visual referent. Both of these skills are the precursors to learning morphology for language acquisition. Twenty-three 12-month-old children…

Two experiments examined whether 4-month-olds (n = 120) who were induced to assign two objects to different categories would then be able to take advantage of these contrastive categorical encodings to individuate and track the objects. In each experiment, infants first watched functional demonstrations of two tools, a masher and tongs (Experiment…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

This experiment tests the age at which left-to-right spatial associations found in infancy shift to culture-specific spatial biases in later childhood, for both numerical and non-numerical information. Children ages 1-5 years (N = 320) were tested within an eye-tracking paradigm which required passive viewing of a video portraying a spatial…

Behavioral research has shown that 12- but not 9-month-olds imitate an unusual and inefficient action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) more when the model's hands are free. Rational-imitation accounts suggest that infants evaluate actions based on the rationality principle, that is, they expect people to choose efficient means to achieve a…

It is surprising that there are inconsistent findings of transitive inference (TI) in young infants given that non-linguistic species succeed on TI tests. To conclusively test for TI in infants, we developed a task within the social domain, with which infants are known to show sophistication. We familiarized 10- to 13-month-olds (M = 11.53 months)…

Although action experience has been shown to enhance the development of spatial cognition, the mechanism underlying the effects of action is still unclear. The present research examined the role of visual cues generated during action in promoting infants' mental rotation. We sought to clarify the underlying mechanism by decoupling different…

The present study investigated German-learning 6-month-old infants' preference for visual speech. Visual stimuli in the infants' native language (German) were contrasted with stimuli in a foreign language with similar rhythmical characteristics (English). In a visual preference task, infants were presented with 2 side-by-side silent video clips of…