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…

Although research has demonstrated impressive face perception skills of young infants, little attention has focused on conditions that enhance versus impair infant face perception. The present studies tested the prediction, generated from the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), that face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual…

How is attention guided by past experience? In visual search, numerous studies have shown that recent trials influence responses to the current trial. Repeating features such as color, shape, or location of a target facilitates performance. Here we examine whether recent experience also modulates a more abstract dimension of attentional control,…

Infants start to interpret completed human actions as goal-directed in the second half of the first year of life. In a series of three studies, the understanding of a goal-directed but uncompleted action was investigated in 6- and 9-month-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm. Infants saw the video of an actor's reaching movement…

Reminder cues can impact remembering in infancy in multiple ways. Infants typically show highly specific remembering following a reminder, or reactivation procedure, but in some instances, (such as size perception) have demonstrated an ability to remember when given a cue or prime that differs in certain specific characteristics, relative to the…

Three experiments using the familiarization-novelty preference procedure confirmed the hypothesis that three-month-old infants could form categorical representations of spatial relations above and below. The infants, after being shown a familiarization diagram with a dot appearing in multiple locations below a line, showed a preference for a novel…

Three studies investigated whether eye gaze cueing in 4-month-old infants is the result of a domain-specific module or reflects the activity of domain-general processes. In two of three experiments, infants perceived apparent motion of the pupils, and this directly elicited saccades, but only when this motion was preceded by a period of direct…

Investigated infants' integration of visual information across space and time. In four experiments, infants aged 12 months and 6 months viewed objects after watching light trace similar and dissimilar shapes. Infants looked longer at novel shapes, although six-month-olds did not recognize figures taking more than 10 seconds to trace. One-year-old…

Existing data indicate that newborns are able to recognize individual faces, but little is known about what perceptual cues drive this ability. The current study showed that either the inner or outer features of the face can act as sufficient cues for newborns' face recognition (Experiment 1), but the outer part of the face enjoys an advantage…

This study compared the use of discrete and relational aspects of visual configurations in making similarity judgments. Subjects were 3-, 4-, 5-, and 8-year-old children and adults. (BD)

Visual preference technique was found to be a method for exploring the genesis of normal and abnormal selective attention, pattern discrimination, and recognition memory. The study of infants with differing degrees of risk for mental subnormality produced substantial evidence for relationship between early visual selectivities and future…

Children's abilities to judge "who is older" without using size as a cue were studied. Five-year-olds were better able to discriminate age than four-year-olds but were not equal to adults. No significant sex differences were found. (Author/RD)

Examines the effect of different training methods on perceptual learning of impulsive children. A matching to sample method (M), and a differentiation method (D) were used. Data indicated that Ss receiving D training learned to process features distinguishing stimuli; whereas, Ss receiving M training showed no preference for a particular mode of…

Seven-year-olds compared successively presented oblique lines which varied as to their position within a square display and their relation to the diagonal axis of the display. Children apparently encoded lines in terms of position and axis features. They used a categorical spatial representational system to compare oblique lines. (Author/RD)