Novelty seeking is viewed as adaptive, and novelty preferences in infancy predict cognitive performance into adulthood. Yet 7-month-olds prefer familiar stimuli to novel ones when searching for hidden objects, in contrast to their strong novelty preferences with visible objects (Shinskey & Munakata, 2005). According to a graded representations…

The present research examined whether infants as young as 6 months of age would consider what objects a human agent could perceive when interpreting her actions on the objects. In two experiments, the infants took the agent's actions of repeatedly reaching for and grasping one of two possible objects as suggesting her preference for that object…

Many studies report chronic deficits in visual processing in children born preterm. We investigated whether functional abnormalities in visual processing exist in children born preterm but without major neuromotor impairment (i.e. cerebral palsy). Twelve such children (less than 33 weeks gestation or birthweight less than 1000 g) without major…

The present study was aimed at exploring newborns' ability to recognize configural changes within real face images by testing newborns' sensitivity to the Thatcher illusion. Using the habituation procedure, newborns' ability to discriminate between an unaltered face image and the same face with the eyes and the mouth 180 degrees rotated (i.e.…

Combining theoretical hypotheses of infant cognition and adult perception, we present evidence that infants can maintain visual representations despite their failure to detect a change. Infants under 12 months typically fail to notice a change to an object's height in a covering event. The present experiments demonstrated that 11-month-old infants…

Two experiments examined developmental changes in children's visual recognition of common objects during the period of 18 to 24 months. Experiment 1 examined children's ability to recognize common category instances that presented three different kinds of information: (1) richly detailed and prototypical instances that presented both local and…

Since Broca's studies on language processing, cortical functional specialization has been considered to be integral to efficient neural processing. A fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the type of learning that is required for functional specialization to develop. To address this issue with respect to the development of neural…

Threatening facial expressions can signal the approach of someone or something potentially dangerous. Past research has established that adults have an attentional bias for angry faces, visually detecting their presence more quickly than happy or neutral faces. Two new findings are reported here. First, evidence is presented that young children…

Recent research has demonstrated that infants' attention towards novel objects is affected by an adult's emotional expression and eye gaze toward the object. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated how infants at 3, 6, and 9 months of age process fearful compared to neutral faces looking toward objects or averting gaze away…

The development of theory of mind use was investigated by giving a computerized task to 177 female participants divided into five age groups: Child I (7.3-9.7 years); Child II (9.8-11.4); Adolescent I (11.5-13.9); Adolescent II (14.0-17.7); Adults (19.1-27.5). Participants viewed a set of shelves containing objects, which they were instructed to…

In three experiments (N = 123; 148; 28), children observed a video in which two speakers offered alternative labels for unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds endorsed the label given by a speaker who had previously labeled familiar objects accurately, rather than that given by a speaker with a history of inaccurate labeling, even…

This study investigated the possibility that enhanced memory for rejected distractor locations underlies the superior visual search skills exhibited by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We compared the performance of 21 children with ASD and 21 age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children in a standard static search task…

In gender-marking languages, the gender of the noun determines the form of the preceding article. In this study, we examined whether French-learning toddlers use gender-marking information on determiners to recognize words. In a split-screen preferential looking experiment, 25-month-olds were presented with picture pairs that referred to nouns…

A critical challenge for visual perception is to represent objects as the same persisting individuals over time and motion. Across several areas of cognitive science, researchers have identified cohesion as among the most important theoretical principles of object persistence: An object must maintain a single bounded contour over time. Drawing…

In three experiments (N = 48 3- to 4-year olds; 100 3- to 5-year olds; 54 4-year-olds), children who could see or feel a target toy, recognized when they had sufficient information to answer "Which one is it?" and when they needed additional access. They were weaker at taking the informative modality of access when the choice was between seeing…