Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

This book contains a compilation of papers presented at the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2023, organized by the World Institute for Advanced Research and Science (WIARS), held in International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2023, held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 22 to 24 of April…

Western adults associate small numbers with left space and large numbers with right space. Where does this pervasive spatial-numerical association come from? In this study, we first recorded directional counting preferences in adults with different reading experiences (left to right, right to left, mixed, and illiterate) and observed a clear…

Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by…

Using concepts and tools of a dynamical system approach in order to understand motor coordination underlying graphomotor skills, the aim of the current study was to establish whether the basic coordination dynamics found in adults is already established in children at elementary school, when handwriting is trained and eventually acquired. In the…

Over-imitation, which is common in children, is the imitation of elements of an action sequence that are clearly unnecessary for reaching the final goal. A variety of cognitive mechanisms have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. Here, 48 3- and 5-year-olds together with a puppet observed an adult demonstrate instrumental tasks that included…

Children's well-documented tendency to behave as if they know more than they do about uncertain events is reduced under two conditions: when the outcome of a chance event has yet to be determined and when one unknown outcome has occurred but is difficult to imagine. In Experiment 1, in line with published findings, 5- and 6-year-olds (N=61)…

This article examines two issues: the role of gesture in the communication of spatial information and the relation between communication and mental representation. Children (8-10 years) and adults walked through a space to learn the locations of six hidden toy animals and then explained the space to another person. In Study 1, older children and…

In tool use, a transformation rule defines the relation between an operating movement and its distal effect. This rule is determined by the tool structure and requires no explicit definition. The present study investigates how humans represent and apply compatible and incompatible transformation rules in tool use. In Experiment 1, participants had…

Adults use eye contact as a cue to the mental and emotional states of others. Here, we examined developmental changes in the ability to discriminate between eye contact and averted gaze. Children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults (n=18/age) viewed photographs of a model fixating the center of a camera lens and a series of positions to the…

Reading speed is commonly used as an index of reading fluency. However, reading speed is not a consistent predictor of text comprehension, when speed and comprehension are measured on the same text within the same reader. This might be due to the somewhat ambiguous nature of reading speed, which is sometimes regarded as a feature of the reading…

The change detection task has been used in dozens of studies with adults to measure visual working memory capacity. Two studies have recently tested children in this task, suggesting a gradual increase in capacity from 5 years to adulthood. These results contrast with findings from an infant looking paradigm suggesting that capacity reaches…

The ability to learn a route through a virtual environment was assessed in 19 older children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and 40 typically developing (TD) children aged 6-9 years. In addition to comparing route-learning ability across groups, we were interested in whether participants show an adult-like differentiation between "useful"…

Although children with language impairments, including those associated with reading, usually demonstrate deficits in phonological processing, there is minimal agreement as to the source of those deficits. This study examined two problems hypothesized to be possible sources: either poor auditory sensitivity to speech-relevant acoustic properties,…

The comparison distance effect (CDE), whereby discriminating between two numbers that are far apart is easier than discriminating between two numbers that are close, has been considered as an important indicator of how people represent magnitudes internally. However, the underlying mechanism of this CDE is still unclear. We tried to shed further…