Two studies were conducted to examine theoretical questions about children's and adults' memory for emotional visual stimuli. In Study 1, 7- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 172) participated in the initial creation of the Developmental Affective Photo System (DAPS). Ratings of emotional valence, arousal, and complexity were obtained. In Study 2,…

We examined the ability of young infants (3- and 4-month-olds) to detect faces in the two-tone images often referred to as Mooney faces. In Experiment 1, this performance was examined in conditions of high and low visibility of local features and with either the presence or absence of the outer head contour. We found that regardless of the…

Recent research has shown that by 30 months of age, children can successfully update their representation of an absent object's location on the basis of new verbal information, whereas 23-month-olds often return to the object's prior location. The current results show that this updating failure persisted even when (a) toddlers received visual and…

We investigated oculomotor anticipations in 4-month-old infants as they viewed center-occluded object trajectories. In two experiments, we examined performance in two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) dynamic occlusion displays and in an additional 3D condition with a smiley face as the moving target stimulus. Rates of anticipatory eye…

Previous studies failed to find evidence for rational action selection in children under 2 years of age. The current study investigated whether younger children required more training to encode the relevant causal relationships. Children between 1 1/2 and 3 years of age were trained over two sessions to perform actions on a touch-sensitive screen…

There are few direct examinations of whether face-processing difficulties in autism are disproportionate to difficulties with other complex non-face stimuli. Here we examined discrimination ability and memory for faces, cars, and inverted faces in children and adolescents with and without autism. Results showed that, relative to typical children,…

We examined whether inductive reasoning development is better characterized by accounts assuming an early category bias versus an early perceptual bias. We trained 264 children aged 3 to 9 years to categorize novel insects using a rule that directly pitted category membership against appearance. This was followed by an induction task with…

Hostile attribution bias (HAB) has been found to characterize aggressive children. Watching prosocial media has been shown to have positive effects on children, and the general learning model has been used to account for these observations. This study tested the hypotheses derived from this theory that exposure to playful fighting would lead to a…

Dynamic spatial indexing is the ability to encode, remember, and track the location of complex events. For example, in a previous study, 6-month-old infants were familiarized to a toy making a particular sound in a particular location, and later they fixated that empty location when they heard the sound presented alone ("Journal of Experimental…

Growing evidence indicates a suite of generalized differences in the attentional and cognitive processing of adults from Eastern and Western cultures. Cognition in Eastern adults is often more relational and in Western adults is more object focused. Three experiments examined whether these differences characterize the cognition of preschool…

Inductive generalization of novel properties to same-category or similar-looking objects was studied in Chinese preschool children. The effects of category labels on generalizations were investigated by comparing basic-level labels, superordinate-level labels, and a control phrase applied to three kinds of stimulus materials: colored photographs…

The ability to detect and prefer a face when embedded in complex visual displays was investigated in 3- and 6-month-old infants, as well as in adults, through a modified version of the visual search paradigm and the recording of eye movements. Participants "(N" = 43) were shown 32 visual displays that comprised a target face among 3 or 5…

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…

Perceptual narrowing in the visual, auditory, and multisensory domains has its developmental origins during infancy. The current study shows that experimentally induced experience can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing on infants' visual recognition memory of other-race faces. Caucasian 8- to 10-month-olds who could not discriminate…

Two experiments examined conditional discrimination in 4- to 6-year-olds. Children learned to choose one of two objects (e.g., circle) when the background was, say, red and to choose the other object (e.g., triangle) when the background was, say, blue. Awareness was assessed and interpreted as a marker of relational processing. In Experiment 1,…