Many objects and events can be categorized in different ways, and learning multiple categories in parallel often requires flexibly attending to different stimulus dimensions in different contexts. Although infants and young children often exhibit poor attentional control, several theoretical proposals argue that such flexibility can be achieved…

We study people's abilities to transfer object category knowledge across visual and haptic domains. If a person learns to categorize objects based on inputs from one sensory modality, can the person categorize these same objects when the objects are perceived through another modality? Can the person categorize novel objects from the same…

In a word learning experiment, 14- and 18-month-old infants are tested on their perceptual sensitivity to coda-consonant omissions. The results indicate that 14-month-olds are not sensitive to coda consonant omissions, showing a parallel with the omission of target coda consonants in early child language productions. At 18 months, infants are…

Inferences of others' social traits from their faces can influence how we think and behave towards them, but little is known about how perceptions of people's traits may affect downstream cognitions, such as memory. Here we explored the relationship between targets' perceived social traits and how well they were remembered following a single brief…

While infants' ability to discriminate quantities has been extensively studied, showing that this competence is present even in neonates, the ability to compute ordinal relations between magnitudes has received much less attention. Here we show that the ability to represent ordinal information embedded in size-based sequences is apparent at 4…

The rapid visual detection of other people in our environment is an important first step in social cognition. Here we provide evidence for selective sensitivity of the human visual system to upright depictions of conspecifics. In a series of seven experiments, we assessed the impact of stimulus inversion on the detection of person silhouettes,…

We investigated infants' ability to recognize the similarity between observed and implied goals when actions differed in surface-level motion details. In two experiments, 10- to 12-month-olds were habituated to an actor manipulating an object and then shown test actions in which the actor contacted the object with a novel hand configuration that…

Children learning the inflections of their native language show the ability to generalize beyond the perceptual particulars of the examples they are exposed to. The phenomenon of "rule learning"--quick learning of abstract regularities from exposure to a limited set of stimuli--has become an important model system for understanding generalization…

When we describe time, we often use the language of space ("The movie was long"; "The deadline is approaching"). Experiments 1-3 asked whether--as patterns in language suggest--a structural similarity between representations of spatial length and temporal duration is easier to access than one between length and other dimensions of experience, such…

To learn relational terms such as verbs and prepositions, children must first dissect and process dynamic event components. This paper investigates the way in which 8- to 14-month-old English-reared infants notice the event components, "figure" (i.e., the moving entity) and "ground" (i.e., stationary setting), in both dynamic…

Perceptual grouping has traditionally been thought to be governed by innate, universal principles. However, recent work has found differences in Japanese and English speakers' non-linguistic perceptual grouping, implicating language in non-linguistic perceptual processes (Iversen, Patel, & Ohgushi, 2008). Two experiments test Japanese- and…

This paper reports the results of two sets of studies demonstrating 14-month-olds' tendency to associate an object's behavior with internal, rather than external features. In Experiment 1 infants were familiarized to two animated cats that each exhibited a different style of self-generated motion. Infants then saw a novel individual that had an…

In the current study we investigated whether 12-month-old infants gesture appropriately for knowledgeable versus ignorant partners, in order to provide them with needed information. In two experiments we found that in response to a searching adult, 12-month-olds pointed more often to an object whose location the adult did not know and thus needed…

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure,…

We explore whether infants can learn novel phonological alternations on the basis of distributional information. In Experiment 1, two groups of 12-month-old infants were familiarized with artificial languages whose distributional properties exhibited either stop or fricative voicing alternations. At test, infants in the two exposure groups had…