Developmental ScienceThis is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader, such as GoogleReader, or to display this data on your own website or blog. Subscribe to this data using MyMedWorm.Subscribe to this data using GoogleReader.Subscribe to this data using Bloglines.Subscribe to this data using MyYahoo.

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'I bet you know more and are nicer too!': what children infer from others' accuracyEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Research has shown that preschoolers monitor others' prior accuracy and prefer to learn from individuals who have the best track record. We investigated the scope of preschoolers' attributions based on an individual's prior accuracy. Experiment 1 revealed that 5-year-olds (but not 4-year-olds) used an individual's prior accuracy at labelling to predict her knowledge of words and broader facts; they also showed a 'halo effect' predicting she would be more prosocial. Experiment 2 confirmed that, overall, 4-year-olds did not make explicit generalizations of knowledge. These findings suggest that an individual's prior accuracy...
Source: Developmental Science - November 13, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Patricia E. Brosseau-Liard, Susan A.J. Birch Source Type: journals

Increasing task difficulty enhances effects of intersensory redundancy: testing a new prediction of the Intersensory Redundancy HypothesisEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Prior research has demonstrated intersensory facilitation for perception of amodal properties of events such as tempo and rhythm in early development, supporting predictions of the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis (IRH). Specifically, infants discriminate amodal properties in bimodal, redundant stimulation but not in unimodal, nonredundant stimulation in early development, whereas later in development infants can detect amodal properties in both redundant and nonredundant stimulation. The present study tested a new prediction of the IRH: that effects of intersensory redundancy on attention and perceptual processing are m...
Source: Developmental Science - November 12, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Lorraine E. Bahrick, Robert Lickliter, Irina Castellanos, Mariana Vaillant-Molina Source Type: journals

Lexical and articulatory interactions in children's language productionEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Traditional models of adult language processing and production include two levels of representation: lexical and sublexical. The current study examines the influence of the inclusion of a lexical representation (i.e. a visual referent and/or object function) on the stability of articulation as well as on phonetic accuracy and variability in typically developing children and children with specific language impairment (SLI). A word learning paradigm was developed so that we could compare children's production with and without lexical representation. The variability and accuracy of productions were examined using speech kinem...
Source: Developmental Science - November 12, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Lori Heisler, Lisa Goffman, Barbara Younger Source Type: journals

The Ebbinghaus illusion deceives adults but not young childrenEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The sensitivity of size perception to context has been used to distinguish between 'vision for action' and 'vision for perception', and to study cultural, psychopathological, and developmental differences in perception. The status of that evidence is much debated, however. Here we use a rigorous double dissociation paradigm based on the Ebbinghaus illusion, and find that for children below 7 years of age size discrimination is much less affected by surround size. Young children are less accurate than adults when context is helpful, but more accurate when context is misleading. Even by the age of 10 years context-sensitivit...
Source: Developmental Science - November 12, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Martin J. Doherty, Nicola M. Campbell, Hiromi Tsuji, William A. Phillips Source Type: journals

Synergies between processing and memory in children's reading spanEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We report a study of reading span in 7- to 11-year-old children that addresses several contemporary theoretical issues. We demonstrate that both the timing and the accuracy of recall are affected by the presence or absence of a semantic connection between the processing requirement and the memoranda. Evidence that there can be synergies between processing and memory argues against the view that complex span simply measures the competition between these activities. We also demonstrate a consistent relationship between the rate of completing processing operations (sentence reading) and recall accuracy. At the same time, the ...
Source: Developmental Science - November 12, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: John N. Towse, Graham J. Hitch, Neil Horton, Katarina Harvey Source Type: journals

The role of competition in word learning via referent selectionEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Previous research suggests that competition among the objects present during referent selection influences young children's ability to learn words in fast mapping tasks. The present study systematically explored this issue with 30-month-old children. Children first received referent selection trials with a target object and either two, three or four competitor objects. Then, after a short delay, children were tested on their ability to retain the newly fast-mapped names. Overall, the number of competitors did not affect children's ability to form the initial name[ndash]object mappings. However, only children who encountere...
Source: Developmental Science - October 29, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Jessica S. Horst, Emilly J. Scott, Jessica A. Pollard Source Type: journals

Ophthalmological, cognitive, electrophysiological and MRI assessment of visual processing in preterm children without major neuromotor impairmentEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Many studies report chronic deficits in visual processing in children born preterm. We investigated whether functional abnormalities in visual processing exist in children born preterm but without major neuromotor impairment (i.e. cerebral palsy). Twelve such children (< 33 weeks gestation or birthweight < 1000 g) without major neuromotor impairment and 12 born full-term controls were assessed at 8[ndash]12 years of age by means of ophthalmological assessment (visual acuity, colour vision, stereopsis, stereoacuity, visual fields, ocular motility, motor fusion), cognitive tests of visual-motor, visual-perceptual and visual-...
Source: Developmental Science - October 27, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Michelle O'Reilly, Brigitte Vollmer, Faraneh Vargha-Khadem, Brian Neville, Alan Connelly, John Wyatt, Chris Timms, Michelle de Haan Source Type: journals

Selective attention and attention switching: towards a unified developmental approachEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We review and relate two literatures on the development of attention in children: one concerning flexible attention switching and the other concerning selective attention. The first is a growing literature on preschool children's performances in an attention-switching task indicating that children become more flexible in their attentional control during the preschool years. The second literature encompasses a large and robust set of phenomena for the same developmental period that indicates a protracted course of development for selective attention in children. We ask whether developmental changes in processes of selective...
Source: Developmental Science - October 13, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Rima Hanania, Linda B. Smith Source Type: journals

Individual differences in language development: relationship with motor skill at 21 monthsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We examined a variety of motor abilities [ndash] manual gesture including symbolic, meaningless and sequential memory, oral motor control, gross and fine motor control [ndash] in 129 children aged 21 months. Language abilities were assessed and cognitive and socio-economic measures controlled for. Oral motor control was strongly associated with language production (vocabulary and sentence complexity), with some contribution from symbolic abilities. Language comprehension, however, was associated with cognitive and socio-economic measures. We conclude that symbolic, working memory, and mirror neuron accounts of language[nda...
Source: Developmental Science - October 13, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Katherine J. Alcock, Kirsty Krawczyk Source Type: journals

Narrative skill in children with early unilateral brain injury: a possible limit to functional plasticityEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Children with pre- or perinatal brain injury (PL) exhibit marked plasticity for language learning. Previous work has focused mostly on the emergence of earlier-developing skills, such as vocabulary and syntax. Here we ask whether this plasticity for earlier-developing aspects of language extends to more complex, later-developing language functions by examining the narrative production of children with PL. Using an elicitation technique that involves asking children to create stories de novo in response to a story stem, we collected narratives from 11 children with PL and 20 typically developing (TD) children. Narratives we...
Source: Developmental Science - October 13, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Özlem Ece Demir, Susan C. Levine, Susan Goldin-Meadow Source Type: journals

Perceived quality of maternal care in childhood and structure and function of mothers' brainEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Animal studies indicate that early maternal care has long-term effects on brain areas related to social attachment and parenting, whereas neglectful mothering is linked with heightened stress reactivity in the hippocampus across the lifespan. The present study explores the possibility, using magnetic resonance imaging, that perceived quality of maternal care in childhood is associated with brain structure and functional responses to salient infant stimuli among human mothers in the first postpartum month. Mothers who reported higher maternal care in childhood showed larger grey matter volumes in the superior and middle fro...
Source: Developmental Science - September 30, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Pilyoung Kim, James F. Leckman, Linda C. Mayes, Michal-Ann Newman, Ruth Feldman, James E. Swain Source Type: journals

Executive function and the development of belief–desire psychologyEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In two studies children's performance on tasks requiring the ascription of beliefs and desires was investigated in relation to their executive function. Study 1 (n = 80) showed that 3- and 4-year-olds were more proficient at ascribing subjective, mutually incompatible desires and desire-dependent emotions to two persons than they were at ascribing analogous subjective false beliefs. Replicating previous findings, executive function was correlated with false-belief ascription. However, executive function was also correlated with performance on tasks requiring subjective desire understanding. Study 2 (n = 54) replicated thes...
Source: Developmental Science - September 29, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Hannes Rakoczy Source Type: journals

Social categories guide young children's preferences for novel objectsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
To whom do children look when deciding on their own preferences? To address this question, 3-year-old children were asked to choose between objects or activities that were endorsed by unfamiliar people who differed in gender, race (White, Black), or age (child, adult). In Experiment 1, children demonstrated robust preferences for objects and activities endorsed by children of their own gender, but less consistent preferences for objects and activities endorsed by children of their own race. In Experiment 2, children selected objects and activities favored by people of their own gender and age. In neither study did most chi...
Source: Developmental Science - September 28, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Kristin Shutts, Mahzarin R. Banaji, Elizabeth S. Spelke Source Type: journals

Brain activation during upright and inverted encoding of own- and other-age faces: ERP evidence for an own-age biasEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We investigated the neural processing underlying own-age versus other-age faces among 5-year-old children and adults, as well as the effect of orientation on face processing. Upright and inverted faces of 5-year-old children, adults, and elderly adults (> 75 years of age) were presented to participants while ERPs and eye tracking patterns were recorded concurrently. We found evidence for an own-age bias in children, as well as for predicted delayed latencies and larger amplitudes for inverted faces, which replicates earlier findings. Finally, we extend recent reports about an expert-sensitive component (P2) to other-race f...
Source: Developmental Science - September 27, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Annika Melinder, Gustaf Gredebäck, Alissa Westerlund, Charles A. Nelson Source Type: journals

Effects of Kindermusik training on infants' rhythmic enculturationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Phillips-Silver and Trainor (2005) demonstrated a link between movement and the metrical interpretation of rhythm patterns in 7-month-old infants. Infants bounced on every second beat of a rhythmic pattern with no auditory accents later preferred to listen to an accented version of the pattern with accents every second beat (duple or march meter), whereas infants bounced on every third beat of the same rhythmic pattern preferred to listen to a version with accents every third beat (triple or waltz meter). The present study compared infants participating in Kindermusik classes with infants not participating in music classes...
Source: Developmental Science - September 27, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: David W. Gerry, Ashley L. Faux, Laurel J. Trainor Source Type: journals

Nonword repetition in children and adults: effects on movement coordinationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Hearing and repeating novel phonetic sequences, or novel nonwords, is a task that taps many levels of processing, including auditory decoding, phonological processing, working memory, speech motor planning and execution. Investigations of nonword repetition abilities have been framed within models of psycholinguistic processing, while the motor aspects, which also are critical for task performance, have been largely ignored. We focused our investigation on both the behavioral and speech motor performance characteristics of this task as performed in a learning paradigm by 9- and 10-year-old children and young adults. Behavi...
Source: Developmental Science - September 27, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Jayanthi Sasisekaran, Anne Smith, Neeraja Sadagopan, Christine Weber-Fox Source Type: journals

Auditory verb perception recruits motor systems in the developing brain: an fMRI investigationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study investigated neural activation patterns during verb processing in children, using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Preschool children (aged 4[ndash]6) passively listened to lists of verbs and adjectives while neural activation was measured. Findings indicated that verbs were processed differently than adjectives, as the verbs recruited motor systems in the frontal cortex during auditory perception, but the adjectives did not. Further evidence suggested that different types of verbs activated different regions in the motor cortex. The results demonstrate that the motor system is recruited during verb...
Source: Developmental Science - September 1, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Karin Harman James, Josita Maouene Source Type: journals

Analogical reasoning ability in autistic and typically developing childrenEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Recent studies (e.g. Dawson et al., 2007) have reported that autistic people perform in the normal range on the Raven Progressive Matrices test, a formal reasoning test that requires integration of relations as well as the ability to infer rules and form high-level abstractions. Here we compared autistic and typically developing children, matched on age, IQ, and verbal and non-verbal working memory, using both the Raven test and pictorial tests of analogical reasoning. Whereas the Raven test requires only formal analogical reasoning, the other analogy tests require use of real-world knowledge, as well as inhibition of sali...
Source: Developmental Science - August 31, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Kinga Morsanyi, Keith J. Holyoak Source Type: journals

Faces are special for newly hatched chicks: evidence for inborn domain-specific mechanisms underlying spontaneous preferences for face-like stimuliEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
It is currently being debated whether human newborns' preference for faces is due to an unlearned, domain-specific and configural representation of the appearance of a face, or to general mechanisms, such as an up-down bias (favouring top-heavy stimuli, which have more elements in their upper part). Here we show that 2-day-old domestic chicks, visually naïve for the arrangement of inner facial features, spontaneously prefer face-like, schematic, stimuli. This preference is maintained when the up-down bias is controlled for (Experiment1) or when put in direct conflict with facedness (Experiment 4). In contrast, we found no...
Source: Developmental Science - August 30, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Orsola Rosa-Salva, Lucia Regolin, Giorgio Vallortigara Source Type: journals

Executive functions in adolescence: inferences from brain and behaviorEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Despite the advances in understanding cognitive improvements in executive function in adolescence, much less is known about the influence of affective and social modulators on executive function and the biological underpinnings of these functions and sensitivities. Here, recent behavioral and neuroscientific studies are summarized that have used different approaches (cognition, emotion, individual differences and training) in the study of adolescent executive functions. The combination of these different approaches gives new insight into this complex transitional phase in life, and marks adolescence as not only a period of...
Source: Developmental Science - August 30, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Eveline A. Crone Source Type: journals

Neural markers of subordinate-level categorization in 6- to 7-month-old infantsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Subordinate-level category-learning processes in infants were investigated with ERP and looking-time measures. ERPs were recorded while 6- to 7-month-olds were presented with Saint Bernard images during familiarization, followed by novel Saint Bernards interspersed with Beagles during test. In addition, infant looking times were measured during a paired-preference test (novel Saint Bernard vs. novel Beagle) conducted at the conclusion of ERP recording. Slow wave activity corresponded with learning a familiarized category at the subordinate and basic levels, whereas Negative central (Nc) and P400 components were linked with...
Source: Developmental Science - August 18, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Paul C. Quinn, Matthew M. Doran, Jason E. Reiss, James E. Hoffman Source Type: journals

How is phonological processing related to individual differences in children's arithmetic skills?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
While there is evidence for an association between the development of reading and arithmetic, the precise locus of this relationship remains to be determined. Findings from cognitive neuroscience research that point to shared neural correlates for phonological processing and arithmetic as well as recent behavioral evidence led to the present hypothesis that there exists a highly specific association between phonological awareness and single-digit arithmetic with relatively small problem sizes. The present study examined this association in 37 typically developing fourth and fifth grade children. Regression analyses reveale...
Source: Developmental Science - August 12, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Bert De Smedt, Jessica Taylor, Lisa Archibald, Daniel Ansari Source Type: journals

The interaction between acoustic salience and language experience in developmental speech perception: evidence from nasal place discriminationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Previous research suggests that infant speech perception reorganizes in the first year: young infants discriminate both native and non-native phonetic contrasts, but by 10[ndash]12 months difficult non-native contrasts are less discriminable whereas performance improves on native contrasts. In the current study, four experiments tested the hypothesis that, in addition to the influence of native language experience, acoustic salience also affects the perceptual reorganization that takes place in infancy. Using a visual habituation paradigm, two nasal place distinctions that differ in relative acoustic salience, acoustically...
Source: Developmental Science - August 11, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Chandan R. Narayan, Janet F. Werker, Patrice Speeter Beddor Source Type: journals

Something old, something new: a developmental transition from familiarity to novelty preferences with hidden objectsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Novelty seeking is viewed as adaptive, and novelty preferences in infancy predict cognitive performance into adulthood. Yet 7-month-olds prefer familiar stimuli to novel ones when searching for hidden objects, in contrast to their strong novelty preferences with visible objects (Shinskey & Munakata, 2005). According to a graded representations perspective on object knowledge, infants gradually develop stronger object representations through experience, such that representations of familiar objects can be better maintained, supporting greater search than with novel objects. Object representations should strengthen with furt...
Source: Developmental Science - August 11, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Jeanne L. Shinskey, Yuko Munakata Source Type: journals

Categorization, categorical perception, and asymmetry in infants' representation of face raceEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The present study examined whether 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants could categorize faces according to race. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with different female faces from a common ethnic background (i.e. either Caucasian or Asian) and then tested with female faces from a novel race category. Nine-month-olds were able to form discrete categories of Caucasian and Asian faces. However, 6-month-olds did not form discrete categories of faces based on race. In Experiment 2, a second group of 6- and 9-month-olds was tested to determine whether they could discriminate between different faces from the same race c...
Source: Developmental Science - August 11, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Gizelle Anzures, Paul C. Quinn, Olivier Pascalis, Alan M. Slater, Kang Lee Source Type: journals

Using innate visual biases to guide face learning in natural scenes: a computational investigationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Newborn infants appear to possess an innate bias that guides preferential orienting to and tracking of human faces. There is, however, no clear agreement as to the underlying mechanism supporting such a preference. In particular, two competing theories (known as the 'structural' and 'sensory' hypotheses) conjecture fundamentally different biasing mechanisms to explain this behavior. The structural hypothesis suggests that a crude '3-dot' representation of face-specific geometry is responsible for the exhibited preference. By contrast, the sensory hypothesis suggests that face preference is the product of several generic vi...
Source: Developmental Science - August 11, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Benjamin Balas Source Type: journals

The emergence of a novel representation from action: evidence from preschoolersEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Recent work in embodied cognition has proposed that representations and actions are inextricably linked. The current study examines a developmental account of this relationship. Specifically, we propose that children's actions are foundational for novel representations. Thirty-two preschoolers, aged 3.4 to 5.7 years, were asked to solve a set of simple gear-system problems. Participants' motions and verbalizations were coded to establish the strategies they used. The preschoolers initially solved the problems by simulating the turning and pushing of the gears. Subsequently, most participants discovered a new representation...
Source: Developmental Science - August 11, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Rebecca Boncoddo, James A. Dixon, Elizabeth Kelley Source Type: journals

Choice latency as a cue for children's subjective confidence in the correctness of their answersEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Research with adults indicates that confidence in the correctness of an answer decreases as a function of the amount of time it takes to reach that answer, suggesting that people use response latency as a mnemonic cue for subjective confidence. Experiment 1 extended investigation to 2nd, 3rd and 5th graders. When children chose the answer to general knowledge questions, their confidence in the answer was inversely related to choice latency. However, the strength of the relationship increased with grade, suggesting increased reliance with age on the feedback from task performance. The validity of latency as a cue for the ac...
Source: Developmental Science - August 11, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Asher Koriat, Rakefet Ackerman Source Type: journals

Knowing about not remembering: developmental dissociations in lack-of-memory monitoringEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Children aged 7 and younger encounter great difficulty in assessing whether lack of memory for an event indicates that the event was not experienced. The present research investigated whether this difficulty results from a general inability to evaluate memory absence or from a specific inability to monitor one feature of memory absence that has been examined in previous studies, namely expected memorability. Seven-, 8- and 9-year-olds, and adults (N = 72) enacted, imagined and confabulated about bizarre and common actions. Two weeks later, participants were asked to recognize the actions that had been enacted. Even 7-year-...
Source: Developmental Science - August 11, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Simona Ghetti, Paola Castelli, Kristen E. Lyons Source Type: journals

Two-year-olds are vigilant of others' non-verbal cues to credibilityEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Data from three experiments provide the first evidence that children, at least as young as age two, are vigilant of others' non-verbal cues to credibility, and flexibly use these cues to facilitate learning. Experiment 1 revealed that 2- and 3-year-olds prefer to learn about objects from someone who appears, through non-verbal cues, to be confident in performing actions on those objects than from someone who appears uncertain when performing actions on those objects. Experiment 2 revealed that when 2-year-olds observe only one model perform a single action, either confidently or unconfidently, they do not use the model's l...
Source: Developmental Science - August 5, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Susan A. J. Birch, Nazanin Akmal, Kristen L. Frampton Source Type: journals

Developmental profiles for multiple object tracking and spatial memory: typically developing preschoolers and people with Williams syndromeEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The ability to track moving objects, a crucial skill for mature performance on everyday spatial tasks, has been hypothesized to require a specialized mechanism that may be available in infancy (i.e. indexes). Consistent with the idea of specialization, our previous work showed that object tracking was more impaired than a matched spatial memory task in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder characterized by severe visuo-spatial impairment. We now ask whether this unusual pattern of performance is a reflection of general immaturity or of true abnormality, possibly reflecting the atypical brain developme...
Source: Developmental Science - August 4, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Kirsten O'Hearn, James E. Hoffman, Barbara Landau Source Type: journals

Development of aptitude at altitudeEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We describe the physiological, cognitive and behavioural profile of a large cohort of infants (6[ndash]12 months), children (6[ndash]10 years) and adolescents (13[ndash]16 years) who were born and are living at three altitude locations in Bolivia ([sim]500 m, [sim]2500 m and [sim]3700 m). Level of haemoglobin oxygen saturation and end-tidal carbon dioxide were significantly lower in all age groups living above 2500 metres, confirming the presence of hypoxia and hypocapnia, but without any detectable detriment to health. Infant measures of neurodevelopment and behaviour yielded comparable results across altitude groups. Neu...
Source: Developmental Science - August 4, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Alexandra M. Hogan, Javier Virues-Ortega, Ana Baya Botti, Romola Bucks, John W. Holloway, Matthew J. Rose-Zerilli, Lyle J. Palmer, Rebecca J. Webster, Torsten Baldeweg, Fenella J. Kirkham Source Type: journals

Use of geometry for spatial reorientation in children applies only to symmetric spacesEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Proponents of the geometric module hypothesis argue that following disorientation, many species reorient by use of macro-environment geometry. It is suggested that attention to the surface layout geometry of natural terrain features may have been selected for over evolutionary time due to the enduring and unambiguous location information it provides. Paradoxically, however, tests of the hypothesis have been exclusively conducted in symmetric (hence 'unnatural' and geometrically ambiguous) environments. The present series of studies examines reorientation by 18-month[ndash]3-year-old children in a rectangular versus irregul...
Source: Developmental Science - August 2, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Adina R. Lew, Bryony Gibbons, Caroline Murphy, J. Gavin Bremner Source Type: journals

Differential development of selectivity for faces and bodies in the fusiform gyrusEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Viewing faces or bodies activates category-selective areas of visual cortex, including the fusiform face area (FFA), fusiform body area (FBA), and extrastriate body area (EBA). Here, using fMRI, we investigate the development of these areas, focusing on the right FFA and FBA. Despite the overlap of functionally defined FFA and FBA (54%[ndash]75% overlap), we found that these regions developed along different trajectories. With age (7[ndash]32 years old), the FFA gradually increased in size and selectivity, and was significantly larger and more face-selective in adults than children. By contrast, the size and selectivity of...
Source: Developmental Science - July 28, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Marius V. Peelen, Bronwyn Glaser, Patrik Vuilleumier, Stephan Eliez Source Type: journals

Representing intentions in self and other: studies of autism and typical developmentEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study suggests that individuals with ASD have a diminished awareness of their own and others' intentions and that this diminution is associated with other impairments in theory of mind. (Source: Developmental Science)
Source: Developmental Science - July 28, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: David Williams, Francesca Happé Source Type: journals

The first steps in word learning are easier when the shoes fit: comparing monolingual and bilingual infantsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
English, French, and bilingual English-French 17-month-old infants were compared for their performance on a word learning task using the Switch task. Object names presented a /b/ vs. /g/ contrast that is phonemic in both English and French, and auditory strings comprised English and French pronunciations by an adult bilingual. Infants were habituated to two novel objects labeled 'bowce' or 'gowce' and were then presented with a switch trial where a familiar word and familiar object were paired in a novel combination, and a same trial with a familiar word[ndash]object pairing. Bilingual infants looked significantly longer t...
Source: Developmental Science - July 21, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Karen Mattock, Linda Polka, Susan Rvachew, Madelaine Krehm Source Type: journals

Spontaneous analog number representations in 3-year-old childrenEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
When enumerating small sets of elements nonverbally, human infants often show a set-size limitation whereby they are unable to represent sets larger than three elements. This finding has been interpreted as evidence that infants spontaneously represent small numbers with an object-file system instead of an analog magnitude system (Feigenson, Dehaene & Spelke, 2004). In contrast, non-human animals and adult humans have been shown to rely on analog magnitudes for representing both small and large numbers (Brannon & Terrace, 1998; Cantlon & Brannon, 2007; Cordes, Gelman, Gallistel & Whalen, 2001). Here we demonstrate that, li...
Source: Developmental Science - July 20, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Jessica F. Cantlon, Kelley E. Safford, Elizabeth M. Brannon Source Type: journals

Touch attenuates infants' physiological reactivity to stressEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Animal studies demonstrate that maternal touch and contact regulate infant stress, and handling during periods of maternal deprivation attenuates the stress response. To measure the effects of touch on infant stress reactivity during simulated maternal deprivation, 53 dyads were tested in two paradigms: still-face (SF) and still-face with maternal touch (SF+T). Maternal and infant cortisol levels were sampled at baseline, reactivity, and recovery and mother's and infant's cardiac vagal tone were measured during the free play, still-face, and reunion episodes of the procedure. Cortisol reactivity was higher among infants in...
Source: Developmental Science - July 20, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Ruth Feldman, Magi Singer, Orna Zagoory Source Type: journals

The role of experience during childhood in shaping the other-race effectEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
It is well known that adults' face recognition is characterized by an 'other-race effect' (ORE; see Meissner & Brigham, 2001), but few studies have investigated this ORE during the development of the face processing system. Here we examined the role of experience with other-race faces during childhood by testing a group of 6- to 14-year-old Asian children adopted between 2 and 26 months in Caucasian families living in Western Europe, as well as a group of age-matched Caucasian children. The latter group showed a strong ORE in favour of own-race faces that was stable from 6 to 14 years of age. The adopted participants did n...
Source: Developmental Science - July 6, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Adélaïde de Heering, Claire de Liedekerke, Malorie Deboni, Bruno Rossion Source Type: journals

Testing the limits of statistical learning for word segmentationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, we ask whether infants' ability to track transitional probabilities between syllables in an artificial language can scale up to the challenge of natural language. We do so by testing both 5.5- and 8-month-olds' ability to segment an artificial language containing four words of uniform length (all CVCV) or four words of varying length (two CVCV, two CVCVCV). The transitional probability cues to word boundaries were held equal across the two languages. Both age groups segmented the language containing words of uniform length, demonstrating that even 5.5-month-olds are extremely sensitive to the conditional pro...
Source: Developmental Science - July 6, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Elizabeth K. Johnson, Michael D. Tyler Source Type: journals

Online usage of theory of mind continues to develop in late adolescenceEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The development of theory of mind use was investigated by giving a computerized task to 177 female participants divided into five age groups: Child I (7.3[ndash]9.7 years); Child II (9.8[ndash]11.4); Adolescent I (11.5[ndash]13.9); Adolescent II (14.0[ndash]17.7); Adults (19.1[ndash]27.5). Participants viewed a set of shelves containing objects, which they were instructed to move by a 'director' who could see some but not all of the objects. Correct interpretation of critical instructions required participants to use the director's perspective and only move objects that the director could see. In a control condition, parti...
Source: Developmental Science - July 6, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Iroise Dumontheil, Ian A. Apperly, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore Source Type: journals

Age differences in the contribution of recollection and familiarity to false-memory formation: a new paradigm to examine developmental reversalsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Using a new method for studying the development of false-memory formation, we examined developmental differences in the rates at which 6-, 7-, 9-, 10-, and 18-year-olds made two types of memory errors: backward causal-inference errors (i.e. falsely remembering having viewed the non-viewed cause of a previously viewed effect), and gap-filling errors (i.e. falsely remembering having viewed a script-consistent event that was not actually witnessed). Previous research suggests that backward causal-inference errors are supported by recollection, whereas gap-filling errors are supported by familiarity. We hypothesized that age d...
Source: Developmental Science - July 6, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Kristen E. Lyons, Simona Ghetti, Cesare Cornoldi Source Type: journals

36-month-olds conceal visual and auditory information from othersEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
By three years of age, children are skilled at assessing under which circumstances others can see things. However, nothing is known about whether they can use this knowledge to guide their own deceptive behaviour. Here we investigated 3-year-olds' ability to strategically inhibit or conceal forbidden actions that a nearby adult experimenter could see or hear. In the first experiment, children were more likely to disobey the adult when she did not have visual access to their activities than they were when she was looking at them. In the second experiment, in which the adult could never see the child, children refrained from...
Source: Developmental Science - July 6, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Alicia P. Melis, Josep Call, Michael Tomasello Source Type: journals

How do individuals with Williams syndrome learn a route in a real-world environment?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study investigated large-scale route learning in individuals with WS and two matched control groups (moderate learning difficulty group [MLD], typically developing group [TD]). In a non-labelling and a labelling (verbal information provided along the route) condition, participants were guided along one of two unfamiliar 1-km routes with 20 junctions, and then retraced the route themselves (two trials). The WS participants performed less well than the other groups, but given verbal information and repeated experience they learnt nearly all of the turns along the route. The extent of improvement in route knowledge (corr...
Source: Developmental Science - July 6, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Emily K. Farran, Mark Blades, Jill Boucher, Lesley J. Tranter Source Type: journals

The neural basis of speech parsing in children and adultsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Word segmentation, detecting word boundaries in continuous speech, is a fundamental aspect of language learning that can occur solely by the computation of statistical and speech cues. Fifty-four children underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to three streams of concatenated syllables that contained either high statistical regularities, high statistical regularities and speech cues, or no easily detectable cues. Significant signal increases over time in temporal cortices suggest that children utilized the cues to implicitly segment the speech streams. This was confirmed by the findings of a...
Source: Developmental Science - July 6, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Kristin McNealy, John C. Mazziotta, Mirella Dapretto Source Type: journals

Children's attention to sample composition in learning, teaching and discoveryEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Two studies compared children's attention to sample composition [ndash] whether a sample provides a diverse representation of a category of interest [ndash] during teacher-led and learner-driven learning contexts. In Study 1 (n = 48), 5-year-olds attended to sample composition to make inferences about biological properties only when samples were presented by a knowledgeable teacher. In contrast, adults attended to sample composition in both teacher-led and learner-driven contexts. In Study 2 (n = 51), 6-year-olds chose to create diverse samples to teach information about biological kinds to another child, but not to discov...
Source: Developmental Science - July 6, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Marjorie Rhodes, Susan A. Gelman, Daniel Brickman Source Type: journals

Dealing with conflicting information: young children's reliance on what they see versus what they are toldEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Children often learn about the world through direct observation. However, much of children's knowledge is acquired through the testimony of others. This research investigates how preschoolers weigh these two sources of information when they are in conflict. Children watched as an adult hid a toy in one location. Then the adult told children that the toy was in a different location (i.e. false testimony). When retrieving the toy, 4- and 5-year-olds relied on what they had seen and disregarded the adult's false testimony. However, most 3-year-olds deferred to the false testimony, despite what they had directly observed. Impo...
Source: Developmental Science - July 4, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Lili Ma, Patricia A. Ganea Source Type: journals

The development of skin conductance fear conditioning in children from ages 3 to 8 yearsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Although fear conditioning is an important psychological construct implicated in behavioral and emotional problems, little is known about how it develops in early childhood. Using a differential, partial reinforcement conditioning paradigm, this longitudinal study assessed skin conductance conditioned responses in 200 children at ages 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 years. Results demonstrated that in both boys and girls: (1) fear conditioning increased across age, particularly from ages 5 to 6 years, (2) the three components of skin conductance fear conditioning that reflect different degrees of automatic and controlled cognitive proce...
Source: Developmental Science - July 1, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Yu Gao, Adrian Raine, Peter H. Venables, Michael E. Dawson, Sarnoff A. Mednick Source Type: journals

Arithmetic word problem solving: a Situation Strategy First frameworkEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Before instruction, children solve many arithmetic word problems with informal strategies based on the situation described in the problem. A Situation Strategy First framework is introduced that posits that initial representation of the problem activates a situation-based strategy even after instruction: only when it is not efficient for providing the numerical solution is the representation of the problem modified so that the relevant arithmetic knowledge might be used. Three experiments were conducted with Year 3 and Year 4 children. Subtraction, multiplication and division problems were created in two versions involving...
Source: Developmental Science - June 30, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Rémi Brissiaud, Emmanuel Sander Source Type: journals

Reduced chromatic discrimination in children with autism spectrum disordersEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Atypical perception in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is well documented (Dakin & Frith, 2005). However, relatively little is known about colour perception in ASD. Less accurate performance on certain colour tasks has led some to argue that chromatic discrimination is reduced in ASD relative to typical development (Franklin, Sowden, Burley, Notman & Alder, 2008). The current investigation assessed chromatic discrimination in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) and typically developing (TD) children matched on age and non-verbal cognitive ability, using the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test (Experiment 1) and a thres...
Source: Developmental Science - June 28, 2009 Category: Child Development Authors: Anna Franklin, Paul Sowden, Leslie Notman, Melissa Gonzalez-Dixon, Dorotea West, Iona Alexander, Stephen Loveday, Alex White Source Type: journals