Research indicates that gender influences how children learn. Those findings do not necessarily mean that boys learn one way and girls another. Still, there are significant differences with respect to gender and how our brains develop. Researchers have found that no single area of development influences those gender differences: rather, a…

Normal auditory perception relies on accurate judgments about the temporal relationships between sounds. Previously, we used a perceptual-learning paradigm to investigate the neural substrates of two such relative-timing judgments made at sound onset: detecting stimulus asynchrony and discriminating stimulus order. Here, we conducted parallel…

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of research on expertise and training in complex domains. First, we present a summary of the origins of the research on expertise and the development of current theory in expert performance. Then we present a synopsis of the literature on expert performance in sport and perceptual-cognitive skills…

Foreign-language learning is a prime example of a task that entails perceptual learning. The correct comprehension of foreign-language speech requires the correct recognition of speech sounds. The most difficult speech-sound contrasts for foreign-language learners often are the ones that have multiple phonetic cues, especially if the cues are…

Robots and humans receive partial, fragmentary hints about the world's state through their respective sensors. These hints--tiny patches of light intensity, frequency components of sound, etc.--are far removed from the world of objects which we feel and perceive so effortlessly around us. The study of infant development and the construction of…

This study examined whether color perception is atypical in children with autism. In experiment 1, accuracy of color memory and search was compared for children with autism and typically developing children matched on age and non-verbal cognitive ability. Children with autism were significantly less accurate at color memory and search than…

We show that simple perceptual competences can emerge from an internal simulation of action effects and are thus grounded in behavior. A simulated agent learns to distinguish between dead ends and corridors without the necessity to represent these concepts in the sensory domain. Initially, the agent is only endowed with a simple value system and…

Considerable research has been devoted to investigating learning without awareness. Burke and Roodenrys [Burke, D., & Roodenrys, S. (2000). Implicit learning in a simple cued reaction-time task. "Learning and Motivation" 31, 364-380] developed a simple learning task in which a cue shape predicts the arrival of a target shape (to which subjects…

Background: Previous research with earlier versions of the WISC and WAIS has demonstrated that when administered to people who have intellectual disabilities, the WAIS produced higher IQ scores than the WISC. The aim of this study was to examine whether these differences still exist. A comparison of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Third…

The human auditory system is often portrayed as precocious in its development. In fact, many aspects of basic auditory processing appear to be adult-like by the middle of the first year of postnatal life. However, processes such as attention and sound source determination take much longer to develop. Immaturity of higher-level processes limits the…

According to the Perceptual Symbols Theory of cognition (Barsalou, 1999), modality-specific simulations underlie the representation of concepts. A strong prediction of this view is that perceptual processing affects conceptual processing. In this study, participants performed a perceptual detection task and a conceptual property-verification task…

The term synaesthesia has been applied to a range of different sensory-perceptual and cognitive experiences, yet how these experiences are related to each other is not well understood. Not only are there disparate types of synaesthesia, but even within types there are vast individual differences in the way that stimuli induce synaesthesia and in…

This commentary endorses J. Kagan's (2008) conclusion that many of the most dramatic findings on early perceptual, cognitive, and social competencies are ambiguous. It supports his call for converging research operations to disambiguate findings from single paradigms and single response indices. The commentary also argues that early competencies…

Understanding how responses become prepotent is essential for understanding when inhibitory control is needed in everyday behaviour. We investigated prepotency in the grass-snow task--in which a child points to a green card when the experimenter says "snow" and a white card when the experimenter says "grass". Experiment 1 (n =…

J. Kagan (2008) urges contemporary developmentalists to (a) be cautious when attributing conceptual knowledge to infants based on looking-time performance, (b) constrain their interpretation of infant performance with multiple methodologies, and (c) reconsider the possibility that qualitative development may be the path by which perceptual infants…