Children (N = 103, 4-9 years, 59 females, 84% White, c. 2019) completed visual processing, visual feature integration (color, luminance, motion), and visual search tasks. Contrast sensitivity and feature search improved with age similarly for luminance and color-defined targets. Incidental feature integration improved more with age for…

Recent research shows that deaf signers show increased behavioral and neural sensitivity to certain types of movement, such as biological motion, human actions, and signing avatars. However, other work suggests that in deaf signers exposed to signed language before age five, the mirror mechanism has minimal involvement during the perception of…

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…

The ability to concurrently maintain representations of multiple objects and their locations in visual working memory is severely limited. Thus, making optimal use of visual working memory requires continual, moment-to-moment monitoring of its fidelity: High-fidelity representations can be relied upon, whereas incomplete or fuzzy representations…

Eye-tracking represents a sensitive, direct measure of gaze allocation and goal-directed looking behaviors that correspond to visual information processing. Clear definitions and standardization of research protocols to document the utility and feasibility of these methods are warranted. This systematic review provides an account of stimuli…

Working memory is a basic cognitive process that predicts higher-level skills. A central question in theories of working memory development is the generality of the mechanisms proposed to explain improvements in performance. Prior theories have been closely tied to particular tasks and/or age groups, limiting their generalizability. The cognitive…

Research on visual local and global perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is incomplete in young children. We investigated 35 three-year-old siblings of children with ASD, either diagnosed (n = 12) or not diagnosed (n = 23) with ASD as well as 14 controls with typical development and with no family history of ASD. Data from the local tasks…

Despite the importance of handwriting for school readiness and early academic progress, prior research on the development of handwriting has focused primarily on the product rather than the process by which young children write letters. In contrast, in the present work, early handwriting is viewed as involving a suite of perceptual, motor, and…

Previous studies of children's reorientation have focused on cue representation (e.g., whether cues are geometric) as a predictor of performance but have not addressed cue reliability (the regularity of the relation between a given cue and an outcome) as a predictor of performance. Here we address both factors within the same series of…

It is usually accepted that the binding of what, where, and when is a central component of young children's and animals' nonconceptual episodic abilities. We argue that additionally binding self-in-past (what-where-when-"who") adds a crucial conceptual requirement, and we ask when it becomes possible and what its cognitive correlates…

Environmental print is composed of words and contextual cues such as logos and pictures. The salience of the contextual cues may influence attention to words and thus the potential of environmental print in promoting early reading development. The present study explored this by presenting pre-readers (n = 20) and beginning readers (n = 16) with…

Despite well-documented attention deficits in children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), distinctions across types of attention problems and their association with academic attainment has not been fully explored. This study examines visual attention capacities and inattentive/hyperactive behaviours in 77 children aged 4 to…

Naming refers to the incidental acquisition of word-object relations as listener and speaker without explicit reinforcement. To investigate possible sources of reinforcement for naming, we examined the effects of a procedure for conditioning reinforcement for observing responses on the emergence of naming in children who previously lacked it. The…

The day-night paradigm, where children respond to a pair of pictures with opposite labels for a series of trials, is a widely used measure of interference control. Recent research has shown that a happy-sad variant of the day-night task was significantly more difficult than the standard day-night task. The present research examined whether the…

Forty-four preschoolers completed 2 conditions of a Stroop-like procedure (e.g., saying "boat" for car and "car" for boat) that differed in whether a 3-s delay was imposed before responding. The test card was visible during the delay period for half of the children and occluded for the other children. Preschoolers' interference control was…