The research focuses on the diagnostics and stimulation of socially disadvantaged children of a preschool age, which is a crucial component of inclusive education. The aim of the research was to experimentally verify through input and output orientation diagnostics the effectiveness of the stimulation program for 5 to 6 year old socially…

The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of…

Two experiments examined the development of the ability to encode, maintain, and update integrated representations of occluded objects' locations and featural identities in working memory across toddlerhood. Sixty-eight 28- to 40-month-old US toddlers (13 Asian or Pacific Islander, 6 Black, 48 White, 1 multiracial; 40 girls; tested between…

Objects in early childhood education (ECEC) experiences have begun to receive a great deal more attention than ever before. Although much of this attention has emerged recently from new materialism, in this paper we turn to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological concern with the (in)visibility of 'things' to illuminate the presence of objects within…

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…

Research indicates that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are superior at local processing while the integration of local features to global percepts is reduced. Here, we compared infants at familiar risk for ASD to typically developing infants in terms of global coherence processing at 5 months of age, using steady state visually…

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a "global shift" over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether…

An ability to perceive tactile and visual stimuli in a common spatial frame of reference is a crucial ingredient in forming a representation of one's own body and the interface between bodily and external space. In this study, the authors investigated young infants' abilities to perceive colocation between tactile and visual stimuli presented on…

The "bouba-kiki effect" refers to the correspondence between arbitrary visual and auditory stimuli. Previous studies have demonstrated that neurodevelopmental conditions and sensory impairment affect subjects' performance on the bouba-kiki task. This study examined the bouba-kiki effect in participants with severe-to-profound hearing…

Children's ability to refer is underpinned by their developing cognitive skills. Using a production task (n = 57), we examined pre-articulatory visual fixations to contrast objects (e.g., to a large apple when the target was a small one) to investigate how visual scanning drives informativeness across development. Eye-movements reveal that…

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…

Although the human proclivity to engage in impression management and care for reputation is ubiquitous, the question of its developmental outset remains open. In 4 studies, we demonstrate that the sensitivity to the evaluation of others (i.e., evaluative audience perception) is manifest by 24 months. In a first study, 14- to 24-month-old children…

Although infants begin learning about their environment before they are born, little is known about how the infant brain changes during learning. Here, we take the initial steps in documenting how the neural responses in the brain change as infants learn to associate audio and visual stimuli. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNRIS) to…

In human adults, visual dominance emerges in several multisensory tasks. In children, auditory dominance has been reported up to 4 years of age. To establish when sensory dominance changes during development, 41 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were tested on the Colavita task (Experiment 1) and 32 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were…