Four experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 9-month-old infants' ability to perceive whether the width relationship between a block and the opening of a box specified passing through or support. Found that six- and nine-month olds looked significantly longer than four-month olds when a block wider than a box opening passed through this opening. (MDM)

Examined the contribution of specific contextual attributes to six-month-old infants' recognition of a well-learned cue. Infants did not encode contextual information in a holistic manner. The perceptual identification of contextual cues that were represented in the memory of an event was requisite for the retrieval of the memory. (GLR)

Finds that children come to preschool with some knowledge of print but do not achieve mastery until the second or third grade. Finds a significant gender effect, but different patterns of that effect for each of the concepts about print task. (RS)

This study compared role of motion in adults' and infants' perception of object unity. Findings favored ecologically-oriented accounts of object perception. Motion was a determinant of object unity for infants. Alignment and common motion contributed to adults' object-unity perception; synchronous color changes did not. Infants detected…

Four experiments examined the perceptual features used by 4.5- to 11.5-month olds to individuate objects involved in occlusion events. Results indicated that 4.5-month olds used shape and size features to individuate objects in occlusion events. By 7.5 months, infants used pattern, and by 11.5 months, they used color to reason about object…

Compared the recognition, perceptual saliency, and naming of color to that of other perceptual object attributes in 2- to 5-year-olds as a function of language age. Found that although color was perceptually salient relative to other visual attributes, no selective impairment to color cognition was found relative to motion, form, and size.…

Two hypotheses were tested in this study: (1) that the elaborateness of children's descriptions would increase with grade level, and (2) that there would be a decrease in peripheral descriptions and an increase in central descriptions with grade level. A total of 211 kindergarten through eighth-grade students were instructed to describe an adult…

Kindergarten children were administered tests of inductive reasoning and field dependence and a series of perceptual egocentrism tasks. Results confirm a positive relation between field dependence and perceptual egocentrism; they also question the validity of the field-dependence construct in early childhood. (GO)

This study was designed to determine the age relationships for each type of perceptual strategy used by nonconserving children during tests of conservation of quantity. The results indicate that the type of perceptual strategy reflected in children's answers varied with their age. (JMB)

Children's cognitive and perceptual development is explained in Piagetian stage theory.

Conducted two experiments which employed discrimination learning methods to test predictions related to the difficulty of discrimination of lateral reversals and of inversions when shapes are presented: (1) successively, (2) simultaneously in lateral alignment, and (3) simultaneously in vertical alignment. Subjects were 6-year-old children. (SDH)

Reports a study conducted to assess the knowledge, attitudes and opinions of preschool children concerning a public figure through use of a questionnaire administered orally. (ED)

An examination of the extent to which adults and children (7 and 11 years old) were able to make discriminations between fixations directed at their eyes and at different positions on their faces. (SDH)

Older adults are significantly slower than young adults in the naming response in the Stroop Color Word Interference Test. Hypotheses attempting to explain this age-related difference in a perceptual-cognitive task have included orthogenic principle, response-competition, and cautiousness. This study examines whether there are any significant…

In a study of spatial perspectives, third- and fifth-grade students were asked to coordinate perspectives on single-object and multiple-object arrays. (ST)