Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anaphora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year-olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing…

The purpose of this study was to compare three variables in terms of how well they predict orthographic functioning. To this end, the authors examined the relative contributions of rapid automatic naming, exposure to print, and visual processing to a composite measure of orthographic functioning in a heterogeneous group of 8- to 12-year-old…

We examined changes in the efficiency of visual selection over the first postnatal year with an adapted version of a "spatial negative priming" paradigm. In this task, when a previously ignored location becomes the target to be selected, responses to it are impaired, providing a measure of visual selection. Oculomotor latencies to target selection…

Six tree shrews and 8 rats were tested for their ability to infer transitively in a spatial discrimination task. The apparatus was a semicircular radial-arm maze with 8 arms labeled A through H. In Experiment 1, the animals were first trained in sequence on 4 discriminations to enter 1 of the paired adjacent arms, AB, BC, CD, and DE, with right…

Early developmental psychologists viewed iconic representation as cognitively less complex than other forms of symbolic thought. It is therefore surprising that iconic signs are not acquired more easily than arbitrary signs by young language learners. One explanation is that children younger than 3 years have difficulty interpreting iconicity. The…

Two experimental series are reported using both reaction time (RT) and a data-limited perceptual report to examine the effects of perceptual load on object-based attention. Perceptual load was manipulated across 3 levels by increasing the complexity of perceptual judgments. Data from the RT-based experiments showed object-based effects when the…

We comment on Goldstein, Davidoff, and Roberson's replication and extension ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102", 219-238 [2009]) of our study of the effect of toddlers' color term knowledge on their categorical perception (CP) of color ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 90", 114-141 [2005]). First, we discuss how best to…

Several lines of evidence implicate the prefrontal cortex in learning but there is little evidence from studies of human lesion patients to demonstrate the critical role of this structure. To this end, we tested patients with lesions of the frontal lobe (n = 36) and healthy controls (n = 35) on two learning tasks: the weather prediction task…

In two experiments children with autism and two groups of controls matched for either chronological or non-verbal mental age were tested on tasks of colour discrimination and memory. The results from experiment 1 showed significantly poorer colour discrimination in children with autism in comparison to typically developing chronological age…

There is evidence that, from an early age, humans are sensitive to spatial information such as simple landmarks and the size of objects. This study concerns the ability to represent a particular kind of spatial information, namely, the "geometry" of an enclosed layout--an ability present in older children, adults, and nonhuman animals (e.g.,…

In previous studies, children disoriented in small enclosures used room shape, but not wall colors, to find hidden objects. Their reorientation was said to depend solely on a "geometric module" informationally encapsulated with respect to color. We argue that previous studies did not fully evaluate children's use of color owing to a bias in the…

Features from stimuli presented at a high rate in a single spatial position (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, RSVP) can migrate forming a wrong combination or illusory conjunction. Several serial and parallel models have been proposed to explain the generation of this type of errors. The behavioral results fit better the two-stage parallel model…

In Experiment 1, "more" and "less" relations were trained for arbitrary Stimuli A1 and A2 with 3 children with autism. The following conditional discriminations were then trained: A1-B1, A2-B2, B1-C1, B2-C2. In subsequent tests, participants showed derived more-less mands (mand with C1 for more and mand with C2 for less). A training procedure…

The environment contains considerable information that is distributed across space and time, and the visual system is remarkably sensitive to such information via the operation of visual statistical learning (VSL). Previous VSL studies have focused on establishing what kinds of statistical relationships can be learned but have not fully explored…

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder, which stems from a genetic deletion on chromosome 7 and causes a profound weakness in visuospatial cognition. Our current study explores how orientation perception may contribute to the visuospatial deficits in WS. In Experiment 1, we found that WS individuals and normal 3-4 year olds…