Subjects of 4, 5, 7, and 20 years of age performed a speeded classification task designed to isolate sources of interference in visual selective attention. While subjects of all ages were unable to avoid processing distractors, older subjects were better able to inhibit distractor processing. (RH)

Tests the effects of stimulus variability on overgeneralization and overdiscrimination errors in children and adults. The subjects (n=64), adults and five-, seven-, and nine-year-old children, participated in a visual discrimination task. (CM)

Infants were tested for recognition and discrimination of expressions. Ten-month olds familiar with a mix of happy and surprised expressions demonstrated generalized discrimination of positive affect. Only after seven months does dependence on the presence of expression-specific features for affect recognition and discrimination diminish. (BC)

Three studies explored whether children's tendency to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape (shape bias) is specific to naming. Findings indicated that 2- and 3-year-olds showed shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object; 3-year-olds also showed shape…