This study examined whether 16-month-old walking infants take the material composition of a handrail into account when assessing its effectiveness as a tool to augment balance. Infants were encouraged to cross from one platform to another via bridges of various widths (10, 20, 40cm) with either a wobbly (foam or latex) or a wooden handrail…

Children, ages 3 to 10 were asked to rank random polygons, which differed in complexity according to interestingness and pleasingness. Complexity preferences varied with age. (ST)

Tests four hypotheses to separate the effect of schemes from drawing-specific influences on young children's drawings and examines whether copies and anticipatory drawings are influenced by schemes in the same manner. (HOD)

Compares estimates of monocular visual resolution of children 6- to 36-months of age with three psychophysical procedures: the Probabilistic Estimation by Sequential Testing (PEST), a modification of the PEST procedure, and the method-of-constant stimuli. (HOD)

Describes preschool children's ability to simultaneously perceive multiple aspects of an object in two experiments during which three- to five-year-olds were asked to describe part/whole pictures. (HOD)

Examines how reference points for the categorical interpretation of high and low (adjectives) were defined by three- to five-year-old children and adults. Shows categorical interpretations of relative terms to be complex dependent. (HOD)

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)

Investigated the extent to which 3.5-month-old infants trained in amodal auditory-visual relations between falling objects and the sounds they made could generalize their intermodal knowledge to a new task and across events. Found that infants tested with familiar events and with events of a new color or shape showed learning and transfer…

Four studies examined 10- to 18-month-old infants' ability to detect and encode correlations among features in a motion event. Findings indicated that the youngest infants process static features in an event independently but do not process correlations among dynamic features; the oldest detect correlations between all three features when the…

Examined whether children differentiate or confuse the domains of folk biology and folk psychology. Children and adult subjects were asked whether the animals depicted in pictures possessed certain biological and psychological properties. Results indicated that by kindergarten, notions of folk psychology and folk biology are sufficiently…

Six experiments assessed young children's spatial orientation relative to their imagined surroundings. The experiments found that children as young as 3.5 years were able, like adults, to accurately walk along a path that replicated the route between their seat and the teacher's desk in their preschool classroom. (MDM)

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)

Examined 2-month-old infants' perception of sparse random-dot displays depicting an illusory shape against a background in three experiments in which background texture, luminance cues, and relative motion information were added or deleted. Found that infants preferred novel stimuli in each condition, revealing an early capacity to perceive shape…

Investigated early determinants of infants' self--other discrimination when presented with a live image of themselves or another person that was either contingent or contingent with delay. Found that infants 4 months and older perceived and acted differently when facing the image of themselves compared to that of another; 9-month-olds showed more…

Children, 24-36 months old, were studied in an effort to examine the influence of cognitive development on the nature of information extracted from stimuli and coded into memory. (ST)