Recent studies have found that infants show relational learning in the first year. Like older children, they can abstract relations such as "same" or "different" across a series of exemplars. For older children, language has a major impact on relational learning: labeling a shared relation facilitates learning, while labeling…

Recent studies in neuroimagery and cognitive psychology support the view of sensory-motor based knowledge: when processing an object concept, neural systems would re-enact previous experiences with this object. In this experiment, a conceptual switching cost paradigm derived from Pecher, Zeelenberg, and Barsalou (2003, 2004) was used to…

We investigated whether 6- and 7-year-olds and 9- and 10-year-olds, as well as adults, process object dimensions independent of or in interaction with one another in a perception and action task by adapting Ganel and Goodale's method for testing adults ("Nature", 2003, Vol. 426, pp. 664-667). In addition, we aimed to confirm Ganel and Goodale's…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) research suggests that the adult capacity is limited to three or four multifeature object representations. Despite evidence supporting a developmental increase in capacity, it remains unclear what the unit of capacity is in children. The current study employed the change detection paradigm to investigate both the…

This research examined the ability of young (N = 96) children to learn about a change in the location of a hidden object, either via an adult's verbal testimony or from direct observation. Thirty-month-olds searched with equal accuracy whether they were told about the change or directly observed it. By contrast, when 23-month-olds were told about…

To locate objects in the environment, animals and humans use visual and nonvisual information. We were interested in children's ability to relocate an object on the basis of self-motion and local and distal color cues for orientation. Five- to 9-year-old children were tested on an object location memory task in which, between presentation and…

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children's (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity.…

This study investigated how young children's increasingly flexible use of spatial reference frames enables accurate search for hidden objects by using a task that 3-year-olds have been shown to perform with great accuracy and 2-year-olds have been shown to perform inaccurately. Children watched as an object was rolled down a ramp, behind a panel…

Like adults, infants use working memory to represent occluded objects and can update these memory representations to reflect changes to a scene that unfold over time. Here we tested the limits of infants' ability to update object representations in working memory. Eleven-month-old infants participated in a modified foraging task in which they saw…

The current study evaluated the relative roles of conceptual knowledge and executive control on the development of "categorical flexibility," the ability to switch between simultaneously available but conflicting categorical representations of an object. Experiment 1 assessed conceptual knowledge and executive control together; Experiment 2…

Two classes of spatial relations can be distinguished in between and within object representations. Kosslyn [Kosslyn, S. M. (1987). "Seeing and imagining in the cerebral hemispheres: A computational approach." "Psychological Review," 94, 148-175] suggested that the right hemisphere (RH) is specialized for processing coordinate (metric) spatial…

Finding hidden objects in space is a fundamental ability that has received considerable research attention from both a developmental and a comparative perspective. Tracking the rotational displacements of containers and hidden objects is a particularly challenging task. This study investigated the ability of 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children and…

Infants' apparent failure in gaze-following tasks is often interpreted as a sign of lack of understanding the referential nature of looking. In the present study, 8- and 12-month-old infants followed the gaze of a model to one of two locations hidden from their view by occluders. When the occluders were removed, an object was revealed either at…

This study examined infants' use of object knowledge for scaling the manipulative force of object-directed actions. Infants 9, 12, and 15 months of age were outfitted with motion-analysis sensors on their arms and then presented with stimulus objects to examine individually over a series of familiarization trials. Two stimulus objects were used in…

Three experiments investigated 14-, 18-, and 24- month-old infants' understanding of visual perception. Infants viewed films in which a protagonist was either able to view the location of a hidden object (Visual Access condition) or was blindfolded when the object location was revealed (No Visual Access condition). When requested to find the…