While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages…

Changes to a scene often go unnoticed if the objects of the change are unattended, making change detection an index of where attention is focused during scene perception. We measured change detection in school-age children and young adults by repeatedly alternating two versions of an image. To provide an age-fair assessment we used a bimanual…

This research reexamined the hypothesis that recognition is a developmentally stable component of the memory system. Recognition performance was compared across age groups. Particular attention was paid to the role of response biases and perceptual skills in developmental increases in recognition performance. (Author/DB)

An investigation of memory development using nonmetric multidimensional scaling. Judgments of similarities between complex objects were obtained from 5-year-olds and adults under two conditions: (1) when objects were simultaneously present at the time of comparison, and (2) when the objects were not simultaneously present and had to be compared on…

This experiment was designed to determine whether children's inability to discriminate mirror-image oblique lines is a function of encoding in memory the left-right orientation or the degree of slope of an oblique line. (Author/SB)

Information presented concurrently and redundantly to 2 or more senses (intersensory redundancy) has been shown to recruit attention and promote perceptual learning of amodal stimulus properties in animal embryos and human infants. This study examined whether the facilitative effect of intersensory redundancy also extends to the domain of memory.…

Three experiments investigated discrimination and memory of 5.5-month-olds for videotapes of women performing different activities (blowing bubbles, brushing hair, brushing teeth) or static displays after a 1-minute and a 7-week delay. Findings demonstrate the attentional salience of actions over faces in dynamic events to 5.5-month-olds. Findings…

Among the findings were that there was no significant difference in performance between Down's syndrome, other mentally handicapped, and normal Ss matched for mental age, when extraneous developmental factors were eliminated; and that there was no relationship between mental age and visual perception in any group. (DLS)

Two groups of children took part in this longitudinal study of eidetic imagery (EI). The New Haven sample consisted of 12 elementary school children, and the Rochester sample consisted of 23 children (aged 7 to 11 years at the beginning of the study). The study was designed to find out some of the qualities of EI and its relationship to memory. An…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of organizational processes for both verbal and spatial stimulus materials within an information processing framework. Children in grades 2 and 4 and adults were tested for their ability to report letter strings reflecting various orders of approximation to English and various dot…

Three studies explore the development of discrimination and memory for symmetry in preschoolers four to six years of age. Issues addressed include the young child's ability to discriminate and reproduce symmetry, and the effects of pattern orientation and complexity on the young child's symmetry discrimination and reproduction. Results indicate…

Discusses changes occurring in two-, four-, and six-month-old infants' visual attention span, through a series of experiments examining their ability to orient to peripheral visual stimuli. The results obtained were consistent with the hypothesis that infants get faster with age in shifting attention to a spatial location. (AA)