Adults often prefer things that they believe are natural, including natural foods. This preference has serious implications, such as the rejection of cultured meat and other sustainable technologies. Here we explore whether children also prefer natural foods. We conducted two preregistered studies with 374 adults and children from the United…

Informed by the biological sensitivity to the context (BSC) theory, this multimethod, longitudinal study sought to examine how family context may be associated with the development of child sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) over a year. Participants were 235 young children (M[subscript age] = 2.97 at the first measurement occasion, 55.3% were…

In this longitudinal multiinformant study negative emotionality and sensory processing sensitivity were compared as susceptibility markers among kindergartners. Participating children (N = 264, 52.9% boys) were Dutch kindergartners (M[subscript age] = 4.77, SD = 0.60), followed across three waves, spaced seven months apart. Results show that…

Adults' judgments of another person's gaze reflect both sensory (e.g., perceptual) and nonsensory (e.g., decisional) processes. We examined how children's performance on a gaze categorization task develops over time by varying uncertainty in the stimulus presented to 6- to 11 year-olds (n = 57). We found that younger children responded…

Although infants and children show impressive face-processing skills, little research has focused on the conditions that facilitate versus impair face perception. According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual featural information, should be impaired in the context of…

In this article, the authors introduce a new theoretical framework for understanding intersensory development. Their approach is based upon insights gained from adults who experience synesthesia, in whom sensory stimuli induce extra cross-modal or intramodal percepts. Synesthesia appears to represent one way that typical developmental mechanisms…

Odor naming and recognition memory are poorer in children than in adults. This study explored whether such differences might result from poorer discriminative ability. Experiment 1 used an oddity test of discrimination with familiar odors on 6-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults. Six-year-olds were significantly poorer at discrimination relative…

Responsivity to graded tactile stimuli was examined in human newborns in successive epochs of active and quiet sleep. Heart rate and behavior were both used as response indices. (Author/SS)

Examined children's and adolescents' ability to identify male sweat and other odors and their rating of odors for liking. Found that only female adolescents could identify and disliked male sweat. When cued about odor identity, both male and female adolescents disliked male sweat more than children. Concluded that dislike for male sweat odor may…

To investigate sensory dominance in early development, a series of studies examined six-month-old infants' processing of multisensory stimulus compounds. Findings indicated that infants discriminated changes in the temporal characteristics of the auditory component but not in the visual component. This and other findings suggested that auditory…

Involving 10-month-old infants, a series of studies examined responses to temporally modulated compound auditory-visual stimuli. Findings indicated that, although the auditory modality can dominate the visual modality at 10 months of age, the visual modality can process temporal information when the temporal relationship of the information in the…

Investigating relationship between infants' visual and tactual exploration, looking and touching responses of 6-month-olds to objects only visually or tactually novel were observed. Results indicated infants were capable of tactual recognition memory, that temperature was salient object property, and that visual and tactual exploration are not…

Three experiments assessed the intersensory redundancy hypothesis in early infancy. Findings indicated that habituation to a bimodal rhythm resulted in discrimination of a novel rhythm, whereas habituation to the same rhythm presented unimodally resulted in no evidence of discrimination. Temporal synchrony between the bimodal auditory and visual…

Investigated the relationship between Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire scores and kinesthetic acuity--the sense of body position and movement--among 10- and 14-year-olds. Found that in the older group, those with high levels of visual movement imagery performed better on measures of kinesthetic acuity; no such effect was found for…