Childhood prosopagnosia

K.D. has been unable to recognize people's faces since sustaining cerebral injury in infancy. Investigation of this disorder carried out when K.D. was aged 8 to 11 years showed that although her basic visual abilities were impaired, they were no poorer than those of other children who recognized faces without difficulty. K.D. had learned to read, but had not regained ability to recognize people's faces; instead she relied primarily on voices as a cue to person recognition. There was no evidence of any degree of overt or covert recognition of familiar faces, and K.D. also experienced problems in visual object recognition. She could, however, classify a visual input as a face, was able to perceive and imitate facial expressions, and was able to perform face matching tasks to an extent limited by her use of a feature by feature matching strategy. It is suggested that K.D.'s impairment affected higher order perceptual abilities, and is in a number of respects comparable to the impairments found in adult prosopagnosic patients.     

The Development of Transitivity of Length in Young Children

This research examined whether developmental changes occur in young children's abilities to learn transitive information. Children 4 years 6 months to 5 years 6 months and 6 to 7 years were asked to learn a series, A > B > C, or a nonseries, A > B, C > D. Younger children took longer to learn the series than the nonseries. Children learning the series correctly answered the inference question, but could not distinguish between situations in which it was possible or impossible to make inferences. The results suggest that there are developmental changes in transitivity abilities and that transitivity is a concept that emerges gradually.     

Concurrent disjoint and reciprocal classification by Cebus apella in seriation tasks: evidence for hierarchical organization

We report the results of a 4-year-long study of capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella ) on concurrent three-way classification and linear size seriation tasks using explicit ordering procedures, requiring subjects to select icons displayed on touch screens rather than manipulate and sort actual objects into groups. The results indicate that C. apella is competent to classify nine items concurrently, first into three disjoint classes where class exemplars are identical to one another, then into three reciprocal classes which share common exemplar (size) features. In the final phase we compare the relative efficiency of executive control under conditions where both hierarchical and/or linear organization can be utilized. Whilst this shows a superiority of categorical based size seriation for a nine item test set suggesting an adaptive advantage for hierarchical over linear organization, Cebus nevertheless achieved high levels of principled linear size seriation with sequence lengths not normally achieved by children below the age of six years.     

Development of the Ability to Insert into a Series

The development of children's ability to insert an item into a series was investigated. Children ranging in age from 3 to 6 years old were given a seriation construction and insertion task, several different types of insertion tasks, and tasks in which they learned to recognize a series. Children's performance on the seriation construction and insertion task was not influenced by their experience with other tasks, and they were able to solve different types of insertion tasks by 5 years of age. The results thus support Piaget's (1965) and Halford's (1982) predictions of stage-related constraints on children's insertion skills, rather than Bullock's (1985) invariance hypothesis, which claims that experience is a more important influence.     

Children's knowledge of the separation of variables concept

Children 8, 10, and 13 years of age were either given prior experience constructing seriations or matrices with two-dimensional stimuli, or no prior experience. Knowledge of the separation of variables concept was then assessed by examining children's use of controlled tests of a problem variable's effect (probe questions), and recognition of the inadequacy of confounded variable tests (negative counter-suggestion questions). Although many children either passed both questions or failed both questions, a significant number of children correctly used controlled variable tests, and yet failed to recognize the inadequacy of a confounded test. These results suggest that although a preliminary form of the separation of variables concept is characterized by use of controlled variable tests, subsequent refinement of the concept includes recognition of the inadequacy of confounded tests. Relative to seriation, prior experience constructing matrices facilitated recognition of a confounded test's inadequacy. Constructing matrices may have focused attention on the simultaneous variation of problem elements on multiple dimensions and thus facilitated recognition of the necessary role of both variation of stimuli on test dimensions and equality of stimuli on nontest dimensions, e.g., a controlled test.     

Children with autism are impaired in the understanding of teaching

Children learn novel information using various methods, and one of the most common is human pedagogical communication or teaching – the purposeful imparting of information from one person to another. Neuro‐typically developing (TD) children gain the ability to recognize and understand teaching as a core method for acquiring knowledge from others. However, it is not known when children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) acquire the ability to recognize and understand teaching. This study (total N = 70) examined whether children with ASD recognize the two central elements that define teaching: (1) that teaching is an intentional activity; and (2) that teaching requires a knowledge difference between teacher and learner. Theory of mind understanding was also tested. Compared to individually matched TD children, high cognitively functioning children with ASD were impaired in their comprehension of both components of teaching understanding, and their performance was correlated with theory of mind understanding. These findings could have broad implications for explaining learning in children with autism, and could help in designing more effective interventions, which could ultimately lead to improved learning outcomes for everyday life skills, school performance, health, and overall well‐being.     

ETUDE INTERCULTURELLE DE LA GENERALISATION DES OPERATIONS: SIMILITUDE ET COHERENCE DES ACTIVITES DE CLASSIFICATION ET DE SERIATION CHEZ DES SUJETS CANADIENS-FRANÇAIS,RWANDAIS SCOLARISES ET RWANDAIS NON SCOLARISES*

Sixty-two French-Canadian children, seven to ten years old; 64 schooled Rwandese children, ten to thirteen years old; and 32 unschooled Rwandese subjects aged 15 and 17 were tested on four piagetian logico-mathematical tasks: hierarchical classification (CA), multiple classification (CM), seriation of weight (RA) and double seriation (RM). Due to the effect of order, separate analyses were performed for tasks done during the same test session. When the results of tasks CA and RM, on the one hand, and of RA and CM, on the other hand, are combined, it is observed, firstly, that the items alternate in order of difficulty and, secondly, that the number of coherent patterns of responses exceeds the null hypothesis in French-Canadian and schooled Rwandese populations, supporting the hypothesis of a complementary and partially synchronous modality of structuration of logical abilities. From another point of view, when the items from all four tasks are combined in a single scale of difficulty, the very close similarity observed between the ranks of the items in the three populations strengthens the hypothesis of a universally determined cognitive development based mainly on the equilibration process.     

like and cross modality recognition in subnormal children

The ability of mentally subnormal children to recognize previously presented visual or verbal stimuli was compared. In “like-modality” procedures they had to recognize words or pictures in the modality in which they had originally been presented. In “cross-modality” procedures the stimulus they had to recognize was in the opposite modality from that which had been used for the first presentation.

In every recognition test the items had to be recognized from among an equal number of novel stimuli. Cross-modality procedures resulted in higher recognition scores. The hypothesis is advanced that this could be accounted for by the necessary translation from one type of sensory image to another in the cross-modality trials, which might minimize over-generalization.     

Perceptual interactions in a minimalist virtual environment

How in real-life or through the use of technical devices can we recognize the presence of other persons and under what conditions can we differentiate them from objects? In order to approach this question, in the study reported here we explored the most basic conditions necessary for participants to recognize the presence of another person during a perceptual interaction. We created a mini-network of two minimalist devices and investigated whether participants were able to differentiate the perception of another person from the perception of a fixed and a mobile object even when the pattern of sensory stimulation was reduced to a bare minimum. We show that participants can recognize when the all-or-none tactile stimulation they experienced was attributable to an encounter with the other participant's avatar or the mobile object rather than with a fixed object. Participants were also able to establish different strategies in order to favor the situations of mutual perception. Thus, in the minimalist conditions of our experiment, the perception of another intentional subject was not based purely on any particular shape or objective trajectories of displacement; it was also based on properties that are intrinsic to the joint perceptual activity itself.     

The effects of attention-directing training on recognition memory task performance of three-year-old children

Thirty-eight 3-year-old children served as subjects in an investigation of recognition memory in which schematic faces differing only in the orientation of the eyes were employed as stimuli. A pretest was administered to all children, after which the two experimental groups received training in either attention to the distinctive feature of the training stimuli (also schematic faces) by means of a matching task, or in labeling the faces according to how they looked (sleepy, happy, sad, mad) and in using the labels to perform a matching task. After the training session all children were given a posttest on recognition memory of the faces. The verbally trained group obtained significantly higher scores on the posttest than either the feature or control groups. These results indicate that although the children were able to discriminate the faces, evidenced in their ease of performance on the training tasks, they were not able to use this knowledge unless given training in attaching labels to the stimuli, which enabled them to store the information for later use. Results are discussed in light of Gibson's (1969) theory of the developmental interrelations of cognitive processes.     

Imitation as a learning strategy in the acquisition of vocabulary

Twenty-four 14- to 30-month-old children observed a model use 20 new words as labels for objects of varied semantic associations. Acquisition of the new words was clear in both elicited and spontaneous imitation by the children and in generalized use of the words. Age was highly and positively correlated with elicited and spontaneous imitation and scores for recognition of the objects associated with the words. Imitation and recognition scores were highest for words associated with food and active objects and low for passive objects and words with no associations. Older children's use of the words immediately after the model's use increased rapidly with the first two presentations, and their use of the words prior to the model's use showed an increasing trend over the series of modeling sessions. Younger children responded at a lower rate.     

Holistic processing of faces in preschool children and adults

Contrary to the encoding-switch hypothesis, recent research demonstrates that 6-year-olds do not rely solely on parts-based encoding to recognize upright faces. This research shows better recognition of face parts presented in the whole face than in isolation, indicating use of holistic encoding. The present study examined whether children younger than 6 years also recognize faces holistically. Four-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults were administered a part-whole face recognition task. Children below the age of 6 remembered parts from upright faces better when tested in the whole-face context than in isolation. This whole-face advantage did not occur when faces were inverted. Although children showed a smaller inversion decrement than adults and generally performed more poorly than adults, the different age groups showed similar patterns of performance, indicating that young preschoolers, like older children and adults, are able to recognize faces holistically.     

Do apes and monkeys rely upon conceptual reversibility?

The ability to seriate nesting cups as a sensorimotor task has posed interesting questions for cognitive scientists. Greenfield et al. [(1972) Cognit Psychol 3:291–310] found parallels between children's combinatorial activity with nesting cups and patterns of phonological and grammatical constructions. The parallels suggested the possibility of a neurally based developmental homology between language and instrumental action [Greenfield (1991) Behav Brain Sci 14:531–595]. Children who predominantly used subassembly, a hierarchical method of combining cups, succeeded at seriating nesting cups more often than those who did not. Greenfield and others [e.g., Piaget and Inhelder (1969) The psychology of the child. Basic Books, New York; DeLoache et al. (1985) Child Dev 56:928–939] argued that success in seriation reflects the child's growing recognition of a reversible relationship: a particular element in a series is conceived of as being smaller than the previous element and larger than the subsequent element. But is a concept of reversibility or a hierarchical form of object manipulation necessary to seriate cups? In this article, we review studies with very young children and nonhuman primates to determine how individuals that do not evidence conceptual reversibility manage the seriation task. We argue that the development of skill in seriation is experientially, rather than conceptually, driven and that it may be unnecessary to link seriation with cognitive conceptions of reversibility or linguistic capacities. Rather, in ordering a set of objects by size, perceptual-motor learning may enable contemplative refinement. Accepted after revision: 10 September 2001 Electronic Publication     

孤独症个体的公平决策：心理理论和自我/他人情绪识别的作用

研究通过最后通牒任务,考查孤独症儿童在公平任务中的决策,以及心理理论和识别自我/他人情绪对决策的影响。29名孤独症儿童和三组对照组儿童参加实验结果发现,孤独症儿童在任务中面对不同分配比例的接受率（2:8、3:7）与对照组之间存在显著差异。心理理论能力和自我情绪识别都与决策存在相关：当处于不公平的情况下（1:9、2:8、3:7）,通过心理理论任务的孤独症儿童才会拒绝接受不公平分配,儿童也会感觉到不高兴并且做出拒绝的决定。     

Children and aging: attitudes, differentiation ability, and quantity and quality of contact

The attitudes and age differentiation ability of forty-seven 3- to 5-year-old children toward pictures of older and younger people were assessed. In addition, cognitive performance on a seriation task as well as the quantity and quality of each child's contact with adults over 60 years of age were measured. Chi squares were performed by sex and age of stimulus photograph on the attitudinal questions. One of the chi squares reached significance on the age comparison and two on the sex comparison. In addition, sign tests were used to assess the direction of the trends on the questions, and both age and sex trends were significant at the .05 level with children being more likely to choose pictures of younger rather than older models and female rather than male models. Ability to correctly order pictures by age was significantly related (r = .53, p less than .001) to the seriation ordering task. Four of the 18 correlations between contact and attitudinal variables were significant and negative.     

Differential emergence of representational systems: Drawings,letters, and numerals

This study investigated the process by which the representational activity and knowledge about drawing and letter and number writing emerge in children 21–46 months old. The results revealed that representational activities developed with age through several phases. Beginning at age 2, children produced different marks for different systems, but children under two produced common graphic marks. Representational systems were significantly correlated with developmental processes, but drawing developed faster than letters or numbers with respect to both their production and their classification. Three-year-old children were able to recognize each system correctly in a sample-matching task, but the recognition of each system was not correlated with representational activity. These findings indicate that only after children engaged in graphic production did they begin to make representational distinctions among systems by drawing on their domain-specific knowledge, although alternative explanations can be suggested.     

Logical competence and transitive inference in young children

Five-year-old children were trained on the length relationships between the adjacent members of a five-term series of sticks. They were then tested on their abilities (1) to judge the length relationships between nonadjacent pairs of the series, and (2) to incorporate an unseen novel stick into the series through inference. Children who were trained with sticks of markedly different lengths succeeded on the first test but not the second; they apparently relied on memory for the absolute lengths of the sticks. Children in the other groups succeeded on both tests. The critical factor in inducing the use of seriation and transitivity seemed to be the elimination of alternative solutions.     

Serial Order in Spatial Immediate Memory

Serial order effects in spatial memory are investigated in three experiments. In the first an analysis of errors in recall data suggested that immediate transpositions were the most common error and that order errors over 2 or 3 adjacent items accounted for the majority of errors in recall. The first and last serial positions are less error-prone than is the middle position in sets of six and seven items. A second experiment investigated recognition of transpositions and found that immediate transpositions were hardest to recognize but that a traditional serial position effect was not found. This may be due to the difficulty of maintaining one set of spatial items when another set is presented for comparison. A probe experiment, in which subjects were asked to recognize whether a single item came from a memory set and then to assign it to its position in the set indicated that the first and last positions were remembered more accurately than were central positions. The combination of serial order data in recall and position data suggests that there are similarities between serial order and position effects in the verbal and spatial domains and that serial order in spatial sequences is position-based.     

The prototype effect in face recognition: Extension and limits

The prototype effect in face recognition refers to a tendency to recognize the face corresponding to the central value of a series of seen faces, even when this central value or prototype has not been seen. Five experiments investigated the extension and limits of this phenomenon. In all the experiments, participants saw a series of faces, each one in two or more different versions or exemplars, and then performed a recognition test, including seen and unseen exemplars and the unseen prototype face. In Experiment 1, a strong prototype effect for variations in feature location was demonstrated in oldness ratings and in a standard old/new recognition test. Experiments 2A and 2B compared the prototype effect for variations in feature location and variations in head angle and showed that, for the latter, the prototype effect was weaker and more dependent on similarity than for the former. These results suggest that recognition across feature variations is based on an averaging mechanism, whereas recognition across viewpoint variations is based on an approximation mechanism. Experiments 3A and 3B examined the limits of the prototype effect using a face morphing technique that allows a systematic manipulation of face similarity. The results indicated that, as the similarity between face exemplars decreases to the level of similarity between the faces of different individuals, the prototype effect starts to disappear. At the same time, the prototype effect may originate false memories of faces that were never seen.