This study investigated developmental memory capacity through picture span and feature binding. Participants included third grade students and college age adults with typical development. Picture span was used to assess working memory capacity when participants were asked to identify, locate, and sequence common visual-graphic symbols from…

We tested 4-6- and 10-12-month-old infants to investigate whether the often-reported decline in infant sensitivity to other-race faces may reflect responsiveness to static or dynamic/silent faces rather than a general process of perceptual narrowing. Across three experiments, we tested discrimination of either dynamic own-race or other-race faces…

Most tasks test memory within the same day, however, most forgetting occurs after 24 h. Further, testing memory for simple words or objects does not mimic real-world memory experiences. We designed a memory task showing participants video clips of everyday kinds of experiences, including positive, negative, and neutral stimuli, and tested memory…

This research examined whether infants tested longitudinally at 10, 14, and 16 months of age (N = 58) showed evidence of perceptual narrowing based on face gender (better discrimination of female than male faces) and whether changes in caregiving experience longitudinally predicted changes in infants' discrimination of male faces. To test face…

Younger brains are noisier information processing systems; this means that information for younger individuals has to allow clearer differentiation between those aspects that are required for the processing task in hand (the "signal") and those that are not (the "noise"). We compared toddler-directed and adult-directed TV…

Previous studies have proposed that humans may be born with mechanisms that attend to conspecifics. However, as previous studies have relied on stimuli featuring human adults, it remains unclear whether infants attend only to adult humans or to the entire human species. We found that 1-month-old infants (n = 23) were able to differentiate between…

This study introduces the new Rotated Colour Cube Test (RCCT) as a measure of object identification and mental rotation using single 3D colour cube images in a matching-to-sample procedure. One hundred 7- to 11-year-old children were tested with aligned or rotated cube models, distracters and targets. While different orientations of distracters…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

Purpose: This study explored visual speech influence in preschoolers using 3 developmentally appropriate tasks that vary in perceptual difficulty and task demands. They also examined developmental differences in the ability to use visually salient speech cues and visual phonological knowledge. Method: Twelve adults and 27 typically developing 3-…

Evidence suggests that people with autism rely less on holistic visual information than typical adults. The current studies examine this by investigating core visual processes that contribute to holistic processing--namely, individuation and element grouping--and how they develop in participants with autism and typically developing (TD)…

Stimulus overselectivity is widely accepted as a stimulus control abnormality in autism spectrum disorders and subsets of other populations. Previous research has demonstrated a link between both chronological and mental age and overselectivity in typical development. However, the age at which children are developmentally ready to respond to…

The present study examined whether 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants could categorize faces according to race. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with different female faces from a common ethnic background (i.e. either Caucasian or Asian) and then tested with female faces from a novel race category. Nine-month-olds were able to form…

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a developmental disorder typified by deficits in visuospatial cognition. To understand the nature of this deficit, we characterized how people with WS perceive visual orientation, a fundamental ability related to object identification. We compared WS participants to typically developing children (3-6 years of age) and…

Previous studies have shown that as a group 6-month-old infants successfully discriminate numerical changes when the values differ by at least a 1:2 ratio but fail at a 2:3 ratio (e.g. 8 vs. 16 but not 8 vs. 12). However, no studies have yet examined individual differences in number discrimination in infancy. Using a novel numerical change…

The contribution of motion and feature invariant information in infants' discrimination of maternal versus female stranger faces was assessed. Using an infant controlled habituation--dishabituation procedure, 4- and 8-month-old infants (N = 62) were tested for their ability to discriminate between their mother and a female stranger in 4 different…