Past research has shown a discrepancy in young infants' use of height information in occlusion and containment events--a pattern typically accounted for by event categorization and rule learning. Broadening these theories, the present experiment examined the role of comparison in young infants' reasoning about physical events. We rotated a typical…

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…

Although working memory has a highly constrained capacity limit of three or four items, both adults and toddlers can increase the total amount of stored information by "chunking" object representations in memory. To examine the developmental origins of chunking, we used a violation-of-expectation procedure to ask whether 7-month-old infants, whose…

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…

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…

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…

Background: Social understanding is often thought to be relatively "protected" in children with Down's syndrome (DS) and to underlie the outgoing personality characteristically attributed to them. This paper draws together findings from our studies of behaviours during object concept testing, generally considered a theoretically "pure" measure of…