Adults use eye contact as a cue to the mental and emotional states of others. Here, we examined developmental changes in the ability to discriminate between eye contact and averted gaze. Children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults (n=18/age) viewed photographs of a model fixating the center of a camera lens and a series of positions to the…

The current research compared the ability of adults and children to determine where another person is looking in shared visual space (triadic gaze). In Experiment 1, children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults viewed photographs of a model fixating a series of positions separated by 1.6 degrees along the horizontal plane. The task was to…

Adults are expert at recognizing faces, in part because of exquisite sensitivity to the spacing of facial features. Children are poorer than adults at recognizing facial identity and less sensitive to spacing differences. Here we examined the specificity of the immaturity by comparing the ability of 8-year-olds, 14-year-olds, and adults to…

Crowding refers to impaired target recognition caused by surrounding contours. We investigated the development of crowding in central vision by comparing single-letter and crowding thresholds in groups of 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults. The task was to discriminate the orientation of a Sloan letter E. Single-letter thresholds,…

Using 20 levels of intensity, we measured children's thresholds to discriminate the six basic emotional expressions from neutral and their misidentification rates. Combined with the results of a previous study using the same method ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102" (2009) 503-521), the results indicate that by 5 years of age,…

Adults are skilled at perceiving subjective contours in regions without any local image information (e.g., [Ginsburg, 1975] and [Kanizsa, 1976]). Here we examined the development of this skill and the effect thereon of the support ratio (i.e., the ratio of the physically specified contours to the total contour length). Children (6-, 9-, and…

We explored the perceptual structure of facial expressions of six basic emotions, varying systematically in intensity, in adults and children aged 7 and 14 years. Multidimensional scaling suggested that three- or four-dimensional structures were optimal for all groups. Two groups of adults demonstrated nearly identical structure, which had…

We explored differences in the mental representation of facial identity between 8-year-olds and adults. The 8-year-olds and adults made similarity judgments of a homogeneous set of faces (individual hair cues removed) using an "odd-man-out" paradigm. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses were performed to represent perceived similarity of faces…

Most previous studies investigating children's ability to recognize facial expressions used only intense exemplars. Here we compared the sensitivity of 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds with that of adults (n = 24 per age group) for less intense expressions of happiness, sadness, and fear. The developmental patterns differed across expressions. For…

Children are nearly as sensitive as adults to some cues to facial identity (e.g., differences in the shape of internal features and the external contour), but children are much less sensitive to small differences in the spacing of facial features. To identify factors that contribute to this pattern, we compared 8-year-olds' sensitivity to spacing…

Three experiments obtained same-different judgments from children and adults to trace normal development of local and global processing of hierarchical visual forms. Findings indicated that reaction time was faster on global trials than local trials; bias was stronger in children and diminished to adult levels between ages 10 and 14. Reaction time…

Two experiments examined the impact of slow development of processing differences among faces in the spacing among facial features (second-order relations). Computerized tasks involving various face-processing skills were used. Results of experiment with 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds and with adults indicated that slow development of sensitivity to…

Investigates infants' scanning of two compound stimuli by presenting features (either squares or faces) inside a frame, the frame alone, and features alone. The apparent disappearance of external bias at about 21 months appears to apply to the scanning of only some compound figures. For schematic face figures, no external bias was found.…

Two different methods which minimize achromatic cues were used to test the ability of one-month-olds to discriminate gray from broadband blue. Test data imply an improvement between birth and one month of age in the discrimination of gray from broadband blue. Possible physiological changes underlying this improvement are discussed. (Author/RWB)

Tests newborns' ability to detect a dot with central vision and compares both the proportion of time the infants fixated centrally and the duration of each central fixation. Subjects were 46 newborns ranging in age from 1 to 7 days. (MP)