The ability to discriminate social signals from faces is a fundamental component of human social interactions whose developmental origins are still debated. In this study, 5-year-old (N = 29) and 7-year-old children (N = 31) and adults (N = 34) made perceptual similarity and trustworthiness judgments on a set of female faces varying in level of…

Recognition memory, defined by novelty preferences, was found to vary over 4 discrimination tasks as a function of length of familiarization for 5-6-month-old infants. (ST)

If learning is viewed in terms of the tendency to approach a stimulus that has been rewarded and to avoid a stimulus that has not been rewarded, then it must be concluded that the subjects in this study did not learn. (Author)

Focuses on auditory fusion (defined in terms of a listerner's ability to distinguish paired acoustic events from single acoustic events) in 3- to 12-year-old children. The subjects listened to 270 pairs of tones controlled for frequency, intensity, and duration. (CM)

One hundred and sixty subjects from five age levels ranging from 3 to 20 years compared photographs of dogs (e.g., two different Great Danes or a Great Dane and a Doberman pinscher) and judged whether they were similar or different. (Author/MP)

Discrimination learning studied in 3-year-olds, indicated that children over 30 months of age did better than younger children, and girls learned faster than boys after the first problem. (ST)

Serial habituation of visual fixations was investigated through a design permitting cross-sectional, within-subject longitudinal, cohort longitudinal, and time-lag analyses. Results suggested that for all ages habituation was under way to the parts of the stimulus in order of the realitive saliencies. No one methodology appeared to significantly…

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)

Examines the interrelationships of task performances and developmental changes of 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds. Significant developmental changes were observed on transposition, cue interference, and spatial memory. The pattern of intercorrelations between tasks suggested a high degree of correspondence across tasks. (ST)

Examines whether age-related differences would be observed between young children and adults for discrimination of synthesized, five-format consonant-vowel syllables that differed in voicing onset time of the initial consonants. (HOD)

Subjects were trained against their initial dimensional preference in a two-dimensional simultaneous discrimination learning task. (RH)

An extension of discrimination-learning theory based on the inhibition of stimulus intensity was proposed and supported as a mechanism of cognitive development. Among 48 normal and 37 educable mentally retarded children the predominant category of transistional children conserved at a low level of stimulus intensity but failed to conserve at a…

Reports on two studies during which 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children were interviewed about three different types of regularities or rules: social conventions, physical laws, and logical necessities. Shows that older children made more distinctions between social and nonsocial items than did younger children. (HOD)

Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Results suggested that at 4 months, infants attended primarily to the featural information, at 6 months primarily to the asynchrony, and at 8 months to both features independently. (Author/KB)