Human infants actively forage for visual information from the moment of birth onward. Although we know a great deal about how stimulus characteristics influence looking behavior in the first few postnatal weeks, we know much less about the intrinsic dynamics of the behavior. Here we show that a simple stochastic dynamical system acts…

This study explores how infants encode an object's spatial extent. We habituated 6.5-month-old infants to a dowel inside a container and then tested whether they dishabituate to a change in absolute size when the relation between dowel and container is held constant (by altering the size of both container and dowel) and when the relation changes…

The effect of element density on selective orienting was examined in 2 experiments with 2- and 4.5-month-old infants. Selective visual orienting to a singleton oscillating target that appeared with other static bars was used to study the effects of element density. Increasing the set size and density of the static bars decreased selective…

This article details an exploration of Baravelle spirals as visual representations of infinite geometric series, focusing on a variety of strategies used by preservice teachers in discovering patterns and investigating relationships of variables.

What happens after visual attention is allocated to an object? Although many theories of attention assume that all of its features are selected and processed, there has been little direct evidence that an irrelevant feature dimension of an attended nontarget is processed. In 5 experiments presented here, the authors used a singleton paradigm to…

In the present study we introduce a sensitive video-based test for the evaluation of subtle mindreading difficulties: the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC). This new mindreading tool involves watching a short film and answering questions referring to the actors' mental states. A group of adults with Asperger syndrome (n = 19) and…

Pigeons' choosing between fixed-interval and random-interval schedules of reinforcement was investigated in three experiments using a discrete-trial procedure. In all three experiments, the random-interval schedule was generated by sampling a probability distribution at an interval (and in multiples of the interval) equal to that of the…

Our research addressed the question of whether sensitivity to relative reinforcer magnitude in concurrent chains depends on the distribution of reinforcer delays when the terminal-link schedules are equal. In Experiment 1, 12 pigeons responded in a two-component procedure. In both components, the initial links were concurrent variable-interval 40…

The present experiment investigated whether rats formed emergent, untrained stimulus relations in many-to-one matching-to-sample discriminations. In Phase 1, rats were trained to match two samples (triangle and horizontal stripes) to a common comparison (horizontal stripes) and two additional samples (circle or vertical stripes) to another…

The purpose of this study was to examine the instructional effectiveness of different levels of chunking (simple visual/text and complex visual/text), different forms of feedback (item-by-item feedback, end-of-test feedback and no feedback), and use of instructional gaming (game and no game) in complementing animated programmed instruction on a…

Perceptual grouping by luminance similarity and by proximity was investigated in infants with Williams syndrome (WS) aged between 6 and 36 months (visit 1, N=29). WS infants who were still under 36 months old, 8 months later, repeated the testing procedure (visit 2, N=15). Performance was compared to typically developing (TD) infants aged from 2…

Infants represent the acts of others and their own acts in commensurate terms. They can recognize cross-modal equivalences between acts they see others perform and their own felt bodily movements. This recognition of self-other equivalences in action gives rise to interpreting others as having similar psychological states such as perceptions and…

In the present experiment, we used a deferred imitation paradigm to explore the effect of crawling on memory retrieval by 9-month-old human infants. Infants observed an experimenter demonstrate a single target action with a novel object and their ability to reproduce that action was assessed after a 24-hr delay. Some infants were tested with the…

Age-related changes in the use of verbal processes for the efficient switching between tasks were investigated in 5-year-old children (N = 32, M age = 5.9 years) and 9-year-old children (N = 32, M age = 9.4 years). Task switching was assessed by means of a cued switching paradigm to examine two switching components: (a) to maintain and select and…

How do people spell the thousands of words at the tips of their tongues? Are words with "regular" sound-to-letter correspondences (e.g., "blink") spelled using the same neural systems as those with "irregular" correspondences (e.g., "yacht")? By offering novel neuroimaging evidence, we aim to advance contemporary debate about whether people use a…