The world's population is aging at an increasing rate. Even in the absence of neurodegenerative disorders, healthy aging affects perception and cognition. In the context of cognition, common factors are well established. Much less is known about common factors for vision. Here, we tested 92 healthy older and 104 healthy younger participants in 19…

Mature'' judgments of causality appeared earlier for social situations (between ages 4 and 7) than for physical ones (between ages 7 and 11). (Author)

A brief training procedure designed to improve elementary school children's performance on the Children's Embedded Figures Test resulted in significant improvement for girls but not for boys. (Author/JMB)

Used event-related potentials to examine infants' ability to form representations of stimuli presented in a haptic modality and to then recognize these stimuli as familiar when the stimuli were subsequently presented in a visual modality. Found that in certain conditions infants encoded the haptically familiarized object, then transferred their…

Use of strategies to eliminate interference from irrelevant information in memory was investigated for 11-, 15-, and 18-year-olds. A directed forgetting paradigm was introduced. Results suggest that 11-year-olds use adequate selective remembering strategy, but not selective rehearsal: most 15- and 18-year-olds did. (Author/DST)

Five-, five-and-a-half-, and seven-month-old infants were tested for sensitivity to relative size as distance information. Infants viewed two equidistant, different-sized objects presented side by side and reaching was used as dependent measure. Findings revealing five-and-a-half- and seven- but not five-month-olds were sensitive to relative size…

Examined the stability of two aspects of infant visual attention derived from the paired-comparison procedure in infants tested at 6, 7, and 8 months of age. The two aspects were novelty preference and exposure time. Suggests that both novelty and exposure-time scores reflect moderately stable but independent characteristics of infant behavior.…

Three studies explore the development of discrimination and memory for symmetry in preschoolers four to six years of age. Issues addressed include the young child's ability to discriminate and reproduce symmetry, and the effects of pattern orientation and complexity on the young child's symmetry discrimination and reproduction. Results indicate…

Investigated the relationship between Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire scores and kinesthetic acuity--the sense of body position and movement--among 10- and 14-year-olds. Found that in the older group, those with high levels of visual movement imagery performed better on measures of kinesthetic acuity; no such effect was found for…