Two experiments examined preschoolers' and adults' relative reliance on visual and verbal information in identification of animals and machines. Findings include both children and adults can use either visual or verbal cues in categorization, and a stricter definition is used in identifying animals. Results suggest that a perceptual to conceptual…

Two experiments related structure of a task to underlying cognitive mechanisms. Found that 3-year olds were no better at predicting behavior from partially true beliefs than from entirely false beliefs. Three- and 4-year olds, and autistic children had distinct performance profiles across tasks. Concluded that conceptual foundations for a…

This study investigated acquisition of music performance skills over 11 practice trials in novice and expert pianists differing in age, training, and sight-reading ability. The finding of a strong positive relationship between the mastery of temporal constraints and planning abilities within performance suggested that these two cognitive…

Three studies replicated and extended Dweck's findings regarding young children's responses to challenging achievement situations. Findings indicated that a composite of cognitive, behavioral, and affective helplessness indices at kindergarten age predicted helplessness 1 and 5 years later, above and beyond gender and kindergarten task ability.…

Effective belief-desire reasoning requires both specialized representational capacities--the capacity to represent the mental states as such--as well as executive selection processes for accurate performance on tasks requiring the prediction and explanation of the actions of social agents. Compromised belief-desire reasoning in a given population…

The development of the "inversion" effect in face processing was examined in infants 3 to 6 months of age by testing their integration of the internal and external features of upright and inverted faces using a variation of the "switch" visual habituation paradigm. When combined with previous findings showing that 7-month-olds use integrative…

Adolescence is a time of considerable development at the level of behaviour, cognition and the brain. This article reviews histological and brain imaging studies that have demonstrated specific changes in neural architecture during puberty and adolescence, outlining trajectories of grey and white matter development. The implications of brain…

Three- and 4-year-old children were tested using videos of puppets in various versions of a theory of mind change-of-location situation, in order to answer several questions about what children are doing when they pass false belief tests. To investigate whether children were guessing or confidently choosing their answer to the test question, a…

The authors studied the evolution of interindividual intentionality in children and showed that the sharing of knowledge and beliefs requires more complex operations than those involved in usual false-belief tasks. The authors conducted 3 experiments on 380 children (aged 5 years, 0 months to 9 years, 6 months). They assessed the children's…

Existing data indicate that newborns are able to recognize individual faces, but little is known about what perceptual cues drive this ability. The current study showed that either the inner or outer features of the face can act as sufficient cues for newborns' face recognition (Experiment 1), but the outer part of the face enjoys an advantage…

This study examined the relation of information processing in 7-month-old preterms ([less than] 1750g at birth) and full-terms to Bayley Mental Development Indexes (MDIs) at 2 and 3 years. The infant measures were drawn from four cognitive domains: attention, speed, memory, and representational competence. Structural equation modeling showed that…

In the present work, we developed a database of nonlinguistic sounds that mirror prosodic characteristics typical of language and thus carry affective information, but do not convey linguistic information. In a dichotic-listening task, we used these novel stimuli as a means of disambiguating the relative contributions of linguistic and affective…

This paper presents autoassociator neural networks. A first section reviews the architecture of these models, common learning rules, and presents sample simulations to illustrate their abilities. In a second section, the ability of these models to account for learning phenomena such as habituation is reviewed. The contribution of these networks to…

After distinguishing between neocortical abilities for executive control and subcortical sensory motor skills for proprioceptive and vestibular integration, we compare a sample of 116 normal preschoolers with a sample of 31 preschoolers receiving occupational therapeutical treatment. This is done in an experimental design controlled for age (mean:…

Down syndrome is the most prevalent cause of intellectual impairment associated with a genetic anomaly, in this case, trisomy of chromosome 21. It affects both physical and cognitive development and produces a characteristic phenotype, although affected individuals vary considerably with respect to severity of specific impairments. Studies…