We examined how infants' categorization is jointly influenced by previous experience and how much they shift their gaze back and forth between stimuli. Extending previous findings reported by K. A. Kovack-Lesh, J. S. Horst, and L. M. Oakes (2008), we found that 4-month-old infants' (N = 122) learning of the exclusive category of "cats" was related…

Mental rotation involves transforming a mental image of an object so as to accurately predict how the object would look if it were rotated in space. This study examined mental rotation in male and female 3-month-olds, using the stimuli and paradigm developed by Moore and Johnson (2008). Infants were habituated to a video of a three-dimensional…

Electrophysiological work in nonhuman primates has established the existence of multiple types of signals in the temporal lobe that contribute to recognition memory, including information regarding a stimulus's relative novelty, familiarity, and recency of occurrence. We used high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether young…

Detection of novelty is an important cognitive ability early in development, when infants must learn a great deal about their world. Work with adults has identified networks of brain areas involved in novelty detection; this study investigated electro-physiological correlates of detection of novelty and recognition of familiarity in 9-month-old…

We used an encoder version of cascade correlation to simulate Younger and Cohen's (1983, 1986) finding that 10-month-olds recover attention on the basis of correlations among stimulus features, but 4- and 7-month-olds recover attention on the basis of stimulus features. We captured these effects by varying the score threshold parameter in cascade…