Subjects of this study were 19- and 23-week-old infants. Results showed that the older infants demonstrated differential attention to novel over familiar stimuli during recognition tests. An examination of their responsiveness during familiarization presentations indicated differing trends of looking activity. (Author/CS)

This study investigated the way 12 infants, aged 1 month and 2 months, scanned the still and expressionless faces of their mothers, of strange women, and of strange men. Each infant was placed in a padded head-restraining cradle under a half-silvered mirror which was angled at 45 degrees to enable the child to view an adult's face at an optical…

Three experiments compared infants' reactions to videos of normally responsive women varying in eye contact. Found that, relative to frontal faces, three-month olds smiled less at images averting head and eye (H&I), head alone (H), and closing eyes (ECL) but not at averting eyes (E). Five-month-olds smiled less at H&I, E, and ECL but not…

Finding suggests that in perceptual learning situations like that of the present study, there may be no particular advantage to impoverishing the environment'' by minimizing irrelevant cues, at least as far as the children's immediate memory for stimuli is concerned. (Author)

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)

Two experiments explored the nature of perceptual development in 5- and 10-year olds and adults. The primary finding was that preassessed salience significantly influenced 5-year olds' ability to discriminate two objects, while salience did not affect 10-year olds' or adults' response times. Results showed that salience effects in perceptual…

Described are three experiments which probed children's sensitivity to structure or organization in visual patterns. Each experiment employed a different paradigm (complexity judgment, discrimination learning, recognition learning, and memory) in order to tap different aspects of children's use of structural information. Subjects were children in…

Four-, five-, and six-year-old children were used as subjects in this investigation. There were 192 experimental and 96 control children used, divided equally between the three age groups. The experimental children received a 1-minute pretest exposure procedure in which 1/4 of the children observed 4 two-dimensional stimuli (irregular pentagons),…

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…

Reports the results of two experiments dealing with children's visual and tactual performance. In the first task, after several presentations of a series, the tactual group made almost errorless discriminations. But with memory demands, tactual performance became poorer than visual performance. Found a large developmental difference. (JAC)

This study examined age differences in children's visual fixation and search strategies of two dimensional visual stimuli. The hypotheses tested were: (1) that no age differences exist in general search strategies regardless of stimuli position, (2) that age differences could be expected with respect to the number and duration of visual fixations,…