Previous research has suggested that infants are able to distinguish between possible and impossible events and make basic probabilistic inferences. However, much of this research has focused on children's intuitions about past events for which the outcome is already determined but unknown. Here, we investigated children's ability to use…

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

Although infants and children show impressive face-processing skills, little research has focused on the conditions that facilitate versus impair face perception. According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual featural information, should be impaired in the context of…

Does valence play a role in children's sensitivity to and use of moral information in the service of selective learning? In the present experiment, we explored this question by presenting 3- to 5-year-old children with informants who behaved in ways consistent or inconsistent with sociomoral norms, such as helping a peer retrieve a toy or…

Although young infants have repeatedly demonstrated successful numerosity discrimination across large sets when the number of items in the sets changes twofold (E. M. Brannon, S. Abbott, & D. J. Lutz, 2004; J. N. Wood & E. S. Spelke, 2005; F. Xu & E. S. Spelke, 2000), they consistently fail to discriminate a twofold change in number when one set…

Behavioral, neuropsychological, and brain imaging research points to a dedicated system for processing number that is shared across development and across species. This foundational Approximate Number System (ANS) operates over multiple modalities, forming representations of the number of objects, sounds, or events in a scene. This system is…

This experiment evaluated the contributions of frequency and contingency of reinforcement to the deprivation-satiation phenomenon. The findings indicated that the perceived contingency of reinforcement is a more powerful determinant of its subsequent reinforcement effectiveness than is its frequency. (JMB)

A go/no-go conditioned head-turn paradigm was used to examine the abilities of 6- and 12-month-olds to discriminate changes in temporal grouping and their perception of absolute and relative timing information when listening to patterns of white-noise bursts. (Author/RH)

Experiment 1 examined the relationship between dimensional preference and proportion of optional reversal shifts among adults. Experiment 2 examined dimensional preference and shift behaviors using an intradimensional-extradimensional shift paradigm. The results indicate that adults show the same type of behavior previously throught to…

These findings suggest that a high density of negative feedback induces both reflective and impulsive children to make fewer errors than does positive feedback. (Authors)

Findings of the present experiment reveal that discrimination processes play an influential role in nonreinforced imitation in severly retarded children. (WY)

This study assessed the adequacy of Gewirtz's interpretation of vicarious reinforcement and examined the development of responsiveness to vicarious reinforcement in an experiment in which 98 children (21/2-5 years) performed a discrimination problem while being exposed to a model who was either rewarded or punished on each trial. (SB)

A series of experiments indicated that by 1 year of age, infants' perceptual categories correspond to linguistically significant categories. Developmental change between 6 and 12 months shows that perceptual abilities of the 1-year-old are not arbitrary, do not reflect all the discriminatory capabilities of the infant, and are similar to phonemic…

Children from 18-30 months who spoke in either one-or two-word utterances were tested for their ability to discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Results showed that these children can discriminate. (ST)