To test whether six-month-old infants recognize the auditory similarity of speech sounds sharing a value on a phonetic-feature dimension, an operant head turn procedure was used. Results indicated that the performance of infants trained on phonetically related speech sounds was far superior to that of infants in the nonphonetic control group.…

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the development of visual accommodation in one- to three-month-old infants. Accommodation responses and pupil diameters were measured at various stimulus distances. Results suggest that changes in depth of focus in the first three months are largely responsible for growth in accommodation. (Author/SS)

Three studies explored preschoolers' assertions that objects come closer together when part of the distance between them is occluded. Findings indicated that preschoolers do not appear to change the geometries they use to represent space, but do show increases in the generality and explicitness with which they map spatial knowledge onto spatial…

Explores how a dyadic understanding of perception cancels the validity it might have as a model for the linguistic process. Discusses commonly misunderstood exhibits in the gallery of perception studies--the duck-rabbit and Magritte's pipe. (RS)

Perception training can be an integral part of management development programs. These games can help trainees understand what perception is, how it works, and how it applies in the workplace. (JOW)

Adults use both first-order, or categorical, relations among features (e.g., the nose is above the mouth), and second-order, or fine spatial relations (e.g., the space between eyes), to process faces. Adults' expertise in face processing is thought to be based on the use of second-order relations. In the current study, 5-month-olds detected…

Rule use in perceptual classification was investigated in adults and in 4- to 12-year-old children. Two studies of performance on triad classification tasks with large samples (N=226 and N=328) are presented to (a) contrast theoretical predictions from the holistic-to-analytic-shift theory (Smith & Kemler, 1977) and the differential-sensitivity…

During the second year of life, infants exhibit a "video deficit effect." That is, they learn significantly less from a televised demonstration than they learn from a live demonstration. We predicted that repeated exposure to televised demonstrations would increase imitation from television, thereby reducing the video deficit effect. Independent…

In normal-hearing children the latency of the P1 component of the cortical evoked response to sound varies as a function of age and, thus, can be used as a biomarker for maturation of central auditory pathways. We assessed P1 latency in 245 congenitally deaf children fit with cochlear implants following various periods of auditory deprivation. If…

In this functional MRI experiment, encoding of objects was associated with activation in left ventrolateral prefrontal/insular and right dorsolateral prefrontal and fusiform regions as well as in the left putamen. By contrast, correct recognition of previously learned objects (R judgments) produced activation in left superior frontal, bilateral…

The present study examined two key aspects of young children's ability to explain human behaviour in a mentalistic way. First, we explored desires that are of a level of difficulty comparable with that of false beliefs. For this purpose, the so-called "alternative desires" were created. Second, we examined how children's psychological…

Gottlieb promoted the value of a developmental psychobiological systems approach to the study of human development. This approach recognizes the importance of comparative, animal-based research to advancing our understanding of the complexities and dynamics of the process of development. The major contribution of animal developmental studies is…

To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital-temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear)…

A study explored a developmental theory of perceptual skills in theater, assessing developmental perception, reflection, and evaluation of theatrical reality, conventions, and themes. Subjects, 33 second graders, 33 fourth graders, 23 sixth graders, and 23 adults, viewed a 48-minute, nonrepresentational, metatheatrical play entitled "This Is…