The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4-10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants…

We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and non-White infants (N = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a singleton) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and "pops out" in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead…

This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

This study explores how feature salience and feature centrality influence inductive generalization in 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. Recent reports indicate that enhancing the salience of a feature--specifically, a creature's head--by making it move shifts children's inductions so that they ignore labels and make inferences that are…

Accurate perception of emotional (facial) expressions is an essential social skill. It is currently debated whether emotion categorization in infancy emerges in a "broad-to-narrow" pattern and the degree to which language influences this process. We used an habituation paradigm to explore (a) whether 14- and 18-month-old infants perceive…

Attention control abilities are relevant for learning success. Little is known about the development of audio-visual attention in early childhood. Four groups of children between the ages of 4 and 10 years and adults performed an audio-visual distraction paradigm (N = 106). Multilevel analyses revealed increased reaction times in a visual…

Children's ability to recognize emotional expressions from faces and bodies develops during childhood. However, the low-level features that support accurate body emotion recognition during development have not been well characterized. This is in marked contrast to facial emotion recognition, which is known to depend upon specific spatial frequency…

Sex is a significant social category, and adults derive information about it from both faces and bodies. Research indicates that young infants process sex category information in faces. However, no prior study has examined whether infants derive sex categories from bodies and match faces and bodies in terms of sex. In the current study,…

The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be…

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…

The present study investigates English-learning infants' early understanding of the link between the grammatical category "verb" and the conceptual category "event," and their ability to recruit morphosyntactic information online to learn novel verb meanings. We report two experiments using an infant-controlled…

Two experiments examined infants' ability to form a spatial category when habituated to few (only 2) or many (6) exemplars of a spatial relation. Sixty-four infants of 10 months and 64 infants of 14 months were habituated to dynamic events in which a toy was placed in a consistent spatial relation ("in" or "on") to a referent…

Young children are slower in naming the color of a meaningful picture than in naming the color of an abstract form (Stroop-like color-object interference). The current experiments tested an executive control account of this phenomenon. First, color-object interference was observed in 6- and 8-year-olds but not in 12- and 16-year-olds (Experiment…

The Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task requires children to switch from sorting cards based on shape or color to sorting based on the other dimension. Typically, 3-year-olds perseverate, whereas 4-year-olds flexibly sort by different dimensions. Zelazo and colleagues (1996, Cognitive Development, 11, 37-63) asked children questions about the…