Human word learning is remarkable: We not only learn thousands of words but also form organized semantic networks in which words are interconnected according to meaningful links, such as those between "apple," "juicy," and "pear." These links play key roles in our abilities to use language. How do words become…

Long-term memory (LTM) has been shown to bias attention to a previously learned visual target location. Here, we examined whether memory-predicted spatial location can facilitate the detection of a faint pure tone target embedded in real world audio clips (e.g., soundtrack of a restaurant). During an initial familiarization task, participants…

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…

We investigated longitudinally the development of attention in two free-play tasks and the relation between attention in those tasks and language ability in toddlerhood. We observed developmental differences in attention from 9 and 31 months both as children investigated a single object and as they investigated multiple objects. Attention in these…

This report investigates the relations between duration of examining and heart rate (HR) across several trials of an object-examination task. A total of N= 20 11-month-olds were familiarized with a sequence of 10 different exemplars from the same global category (animals or furniture) before they received an exemplar from the contrasting category…