Studies showed that individual differences in encoding speed as well as looking behaviour during the encoding of facial stimuli can relate to differences in subsequent face discrimination. Nevertheless, a direct linkage between encoding speed and looking behaviour during the encoding of facial stimuli and the role of these encoding characteristics…

Infants have shown variable success in quantity comparison tasks, with infants of a given age sometimes successfully discriminating numerical differences at a 2:3 ratio but requiring 1:2 and even 1:4 ratios of change at other times. The current explanations for these variable results include the two-systems proposal--a theoretical framework that…

Time perception is important for many aspects of human behavior, and a large literature documents that adults represent intervals and that their ability to discriminate temporal intervals is ratio dependent. Here we replicate a recent study by vanMarle and Wynn (2006 ) that used the visual habituation paradigm and demonstrated that temporal…

Two experiments examined 6-month-olds' ability to discriminate between visual displays of various number of dots varying in size and position, and with controls for other extraneous variables. Findings indicated that infants could discriminate between large sets on the basis of numerosity if they differed by a large ratio (8 versus 16, but not 8…

Serial habituation of visual fixations was investigated through a design permitting cross-sectional, within-subject longitudinal, cohort longitudinal, and time-lag analyses. Results suggested that for all ages habituation was under way to the parts of the stimulus in order of the realitive saliencies. No one methodology appeared to significantly…

Two experiments examined six-month-olds' ability to form an abstract containment category. Results indicated that, after habituation to object pairs in a containment relation, infants looked reliably longer at an example of an unfamiliar versus familiar containment relation, indicating that they could form a categorical representation of…

Habituated 180 neonates to white lights of varying luminance and tested for recovery of habituation to green, yellow, or red lights varying in excitation purity. Found that newborns discriminated chromatic stimuli from white only when excitation purity exceeded levels much higher than those for adults. Results reinforce view that neonates' vision…

Two experiments explored how infants learn to form an abstract categorical representation of support (i.e., on) when habituated to few (i.e., 2) or many (i.e., 6) examples of the relation. When habituated to 2 pairs of objects in a support relation, 14-month-olds, but not 10-month-olds, formed the abstract spatial category (i.e., generalized the…

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)

Two experiments investigated infants' sensitivity to amount of continuous quantity and to changes in amount of continuous quantity. Found that 6-month-olds looked significantly longer at a novel quantity than at the familiar quantity. Nine-month-olds looked significantly longer at an impossible event than at a possible event. Findings question…

This study examines serial habituation in a sample of 54 infants aged 2, 3, and 4 months to determine whether age changes are partially a function of different "strategies" rather than simply different rates of habituation. The serial habituation hypothesis proposes that attention and habituation of attention proceed in order of the relative…

Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Results suggested that at 4 months, infants attended primarily to the featural information, at 6 months primarily to the asynchrony, and at 8 months to both features independently. (Author/KB)

Three experiments assessed the intersensory redundancy hypothesis in early infancy. Findings indicated that habituation to a bimodal rhythm resulted in discrimination of a novel rhythm, whereas habituation to the same rhythm presented unimodally resulted in no evidence of discrimination. Temporal synchrony between the bimodal auditory and visual…

This study investigated attention to and recognition of components in compound stimuli among infants and preschoolers. Oddity tasks with preschoolers and familiarization/novelty-preference tasks with infants demonstrated successful discrimination among stimuli components on basis of edge property information. Matching tasks with preschoolers and…