Learning to read depends on the ability to extract precise details of letter combinations, which convey critical information that distinguishes tens of thousands of visual word forms. To support fluent reading skill, one crucial neural developmental process is one's brain sensitivity to statistical constraints inherent in combining letters into…

Attending to distracting or competing information is typically considered detrimental to learning, but the presence of competing information can also facilitate learning when it is relevant to ongoing task goals. Educational settings often contain contextual elements such as classroom decorations or visual aids to enhance student learning. Despite…

The study tested the hypotheses that boys will have an advantage learning the fractions number line and this advantage will be mediated by spatial abilities. Fractions number line and, as a contrast, fractions arithmetic performance were assessed for 342 adolescents, as was their intelligence, working memory, and various spatial abilities. Boys…

Sleep plays an active role in memory consolidation. Because children with Down syndrome (DS) and Williams syndrome (WS) experience significant problems with sleep and also with learning, we predicted that sleep-dependent memory consolidation would be impaired in these children when compared to typically developing (TD) children. This is the first…

Research on animals, infants, children, and adults provides evidence that distinct cognitive systems underlie navigation and object recognition. Here we examine whether and how these systems interact when children interpret 2D edge-based perspectival line drawings of scenes and objects. Such drawings serve as symbols early in development, and they…

In contrast to other primates, human children's imitation performance goes from low to high fidelity soon after infancy. Are such changes associated with the development of other forms of learning? We addressed this question by testing 215 children (26-59 months) on two social conditions (imitation, emulation)--involving a demonstration--and two…

Face processing undergoes a fairly protracted developmental time course but the neural underpinnings are not well understood. Prior fMRI studies have only examined progressive changes (i.e. increases in specialization in certain regions with age), which would be predicted by both the Interactive Specialization (IS) and maturational theories of…

Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e. word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has…

In two studies, we investigated infants' preference for infant-directed (ID) action or "motionese" (Brand, Baldwin & Ashburn, 2002) relative to adult-directed (AD) action. In Study 1, full-featured videos were shown to 32 6- to 8-month-olds, who demonstrated a strong preference for ID action. In Study 2, infants at 6-8 months (n= 28) and 11-13…

The experiments reported here were concerned with the development of delayed self-recognition. Children were videotaped playing a game and were marked covertly with a sticker on their forehead while doing so. The findings, of both a cross-sectional sample and a prospective longitudinal one, revealed that 3- but not 2.5-year-old children reached to…