In this study, metacognition refers to performing visual analysis and discrimination of real life events and situations in naïve psychology, naïve physics, and naïve biology domains. It is used, along with measuring reaction time, to examine differences in the ability of four groups of students to select appropriate pictures that correspond with…

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a developmental disorder typified by deficits in visuospatial cognition. To understand the nature of this deficit, we characterized how people with WS perceive visual orientation, a fundamental ability related to object identification. We compared WS participants to typically developing children (3-6 years of age) and…

Previous studies have shown that as a group 6-month-old infants successfully discriminate numerical changes when the values differ by at least a 1:2 ratio but fail at a 2:3 ratio (e.g. 8 vs. 16 but not 8 vs. 12). However, no studies have yet examined individual differences in number discrimination in infancy. Using a novel numerical change…

We examined changes in the efficiency of visual selection over the first postnatal year with an adapted version of a "spatial negative priming" paradigm. In this task, when a previously ignored location becomes the target to be selected, responses to it are impaired, providing a measure of visual selection. Oculomotor latencies to target selection…

The current study examined the effects of institutionalization on the discrimination of facial expressions of emotion in three groups of 42-month-old children. One group consisted of children abandoned at birth who were randomly assigned to Care-as-Usual (institutional care) following a baseline assessment. Another group consisted of children…

This study explores the extent to which a bilingual advantage can be observed for executive function tasks in children of varying levels of language dominance, and examines the contributions of general cognitive knowledge, linguistic abilities, language use and socio-economic level to performance. Welsh-English bilingual and English monolingual…

Two experiments investigated developmental changes in large number discrimination with visual-spatial arrays. Previous studies found that 6-month-old infants were able to discriminate arrays that differ by a ratio of 1:2 but not 2:3. We found that by 10 months, infants were able to reliably discriminate 8 from 12 elements (2:3) but not 8 from 10…

Observers watched videotaped face-to-face mother-infant and stranger-infant interactions of 12 infants at 2, 4, or 6 months of age. Half of the observers saw each mother paired with her own infant and another infant of the same age (mother tapes) and half saw each infant paired with his or her mother and with a stranger (infant tapes). Observers…

The contribution of motion and feature invariant information in infants' discrimination of maternal versus female stranger faces was assessed. Using an infant controlled habituation--dishabituation procedure, 4- and 8-month-old infants (N = 62) were tested for their ability to discriminate between their mother and a female stranger in 4 different…

Investigated changes in non-nutritive sucking behavior of premature infants when light stimulation was presented. Results generally support past evidence that premature infants are capable of making orienting and discriminative responses to visual stimuli and chronological age effects were indicated. (DP)

The ability to interpret emotions in facial expressions is crucial for social functioning across the lifespan. Facial expression recognition develops rapidly during infancy and improves with age during the preschool years. However, the developmental trajectory from late childhood to adulthood is less clear. We tested older children, adolescents…

To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital-temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear)…

Purpose: This research examined how the color distribution of symbols within a visual aided augmentative and alternative communication array influenced the speed and accuracy with which participants with and without Down syndrome located a target picture symbol. Method: Eight typically developing children below the age of 4 years, 8 typically…

Infants five- and seven-months-old were sequentially shown three stimulus arrays of visual elements, only one of which was capable of producing subjective contours. An infant habituation control procedure was used to test infants' abilities to discriminate the arrays. (Author/RH)

Four experiments examined the ability of infants to form categorical representations for the spatial relations "above" and "below." Found that three- and four-month-olds could form categorical representations for above and below when a diamond-shape was presented above or below a horizontal bar but could not do so when a number…