The relationship between discriminability of scaling stimuli and assessed dimensional dominance was investigated in three studies. Results indicated that kindergarten children bring to the experimental situation a dimensional preference even when the values of all dimensions present are of equal and known discriminability. (GO)

Results indicate that for children in this study's age range orientation is a less salient discriminative cue than either size or color. (Author/MB)

Four experiments assessed converging aspects of four-month-old infants' perceptions of visual patterns. Results together corroborate and extend previous findings that vertical symmetry has a special status in early perceptual development and that infants can perceive pattern wholes. (Author/AS)

In three experiments, nine-month-old infants were trained to fixate on a particular feature in a pair of stimuli that varied along three dimensions. In a fourth experiment, infants were trained to fixate on a stimulus compound until reaching a learning criterion. Infants' discrimination learning under these conditions implied an ability to attend…

Investigates the dominance of global versus local visual properties in four-month-old infants as a function of individual differences in fixation duration. Suggests that long-looking infants process visual information more slowly than short-looking infants, and there may be qualitative differences in the manner in which the two groups of infants…

This study examines serial habituation in a sample of 54 infants aged 2, 3, and 4 months to determine whether age changes are partially a function of different "strategies" rather than simply different rates of habituation. The serial habituation hypothesis proposes that attention and habituation of attention proceed in order of the relative…

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…

In order to examine the nature of dimensional processing in children, 20 kindergarten and 20 third grade Chinese-American children were asked to make similarity judgments for unidimensional sets of stimuli differing in color (hue), size, and shape, respectively. Age differences were generally confined to the color set. The judgments of the older…