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People see some impossible events as more impossible than others. For example, walking through a solid wall seems more impossible if it is made of stone rather than wood. Across four experiments, we investigated how children and adults assess the relative impossibility of events, contrasting two kinds of information they may use: perceptual information and causal knowledge. In each experiment, participants were told about a wizard who could magically transform target objects into other things. Participants then assessed which of the two transformation spells would be easier or harder, a spell transforming a target object into a perceptual match (i.e., a similar-looking thing) or one transforming it into a causal match (e.g., an item made of similar materials). In Experiments 1–3, children aged 4–7 mainly thought that transformations into the perceptual match would be easier, though this tendency varied with age. Adults were overall split when choosing which spell would be easier. In Experiment 1, this was because of variations in their judgments across different pairs of spells; in Experiments 2 and 4, the split resulted because different subsets of adults preferred either the perceptual or causal match. Overall, these findings show that children, and many adults, use perceptual reasoning to assess relative impossibility. Public Significance Statement: Besides differentiating possible events from ones that are impossible, people see some events as more impossible than others. We investigated how children and adults make these judgments by asking them about magical transformations. One way that people might assess the relative impossibility of magic is by drawing on their causal knowledge. However, we find that young children, and even many adults, instead make these judgments using shallow perceptual information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The experimental evaluation of young children's socio-emotional abilities is limited by the lack of existing specific measures to assess this population and by the relative difficulty for researchers to adapt measures designed for the general population. Methods: This study examined six early social-emotional abilities in 86 typically developing children aged 1 to 3 years using an eye-tracking-based experimental paradigm that combined visual preference tasks adapted from pre-existing infant studies. Objectives: The aim of this study is to obtain developmental norms in six early social-emotional abilities in typical children aged 1 to 3 years that would be promising for an understanding of disorders of mental development. These developmental standards are essential to enable comparative assessments with children with atypical development, such as children with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD). Results: The participants had greater spontaneous visual preferences for biological (vs. non-biological) motion, socially salient (vs. non-social) stimuli, the eye (vs. mouth) area of emotional expressions, angry (vs. happy) faces, and objects of joint attention (vs. non-looked-at ones). Interestingly, although the prosocial (vs. antisocial) scene of the socio-moral task was preferred, both the helper and hinderer characters were equally gazed at. Finally, correlational analyses revealed that performance was neither related to participants' age nor to each other (dismissing the hypothesis of a common underpinning process). Conclusion: Our revised experimental paradigm is possible in infants aged 1 to 3 years and thus provides additional scientific proof on the direct assessment of these six socio-emotional abilities in this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Awe is a profound, self‐transcendent emotion. To illuminate its origin, four preregistered studies examined how U.S. 4‐ to 9‐year‐old children perceive awe‐inspiring stimuli (N = 444, 55% female, 58% White, tested in 2020–2023). Awe‐inspiring expansive nature (Study 1) and natural disaster scenes (Study 2) evoked perceived vastness, motivation to explore, and awareness of the unknown more than everyday scenes did (d ranging 0.32–1.76). Compared to expansive social stimuli, expansive nature stimuli more positively affected children's sense of self (Study 3). Diverse awe‐inspiring scenes (vast nature, natural disasters, and slow‐motion objects) all elicited awe and higher learning motivation than everyday scenes did (Study 4). These findings suggest that children appreciate awe‐inspiring visual experiences, illuminating the origins and nature of awe as a self‐transcendent experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 color‐motion than luminance‐motion. Individual differences in feature search (β =.11) and incidental feature integration (β =.06) mediated age‐related changes in conjunction visual search, an index of visual selective attention. These findings suggest that visual selective attention is best conceptualized as a series of developmental trajectories, within an individual, that vary by an object's defining features. These data have implications for design of educational and interventional strategies intended to maximize attention for learning and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Previous studies have shown that children with intermittent exotropia (IXT) have a higher rate of psychiatric abnormalities as they grow up, such as attention deficit. This study explored visual and hearing attention among children with IXT, and evaluated its association with clinical characteristics and cognitive development. Methods: Forty-nine children with a diagnosis of IXT and 29 children with traditional development were recruited. The Integrated Visual and Auditory Continuous Performance Test (IVA-CPT) was used to measure the subjects' full-scale response control quotient (FSRCQ), full-scale attention quotient (FSAQ), auditory response control quotient (ARCQ), auditory attention quotient (AAQ), visual response control quotient (VRCQ), and visual attention quotient (VAQ). The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV) was used to assess their cognitive function. The differences between the scores of children with IXT and normal controls were analyzed. Results: The results showed that the FSRCQ, FSAQ, ARCQ, AAQ, VRCQ, and VAQ of children with IXT were all lower than those of normal controls with the same age (P < 0.05). The level of attention was significantly correlated with the age of strabismus onset (P < 0.05), but not with the degree of strabismus, stereopsis, or fusion control score. In addition, audiovisual attention was correlated significantly with their cognitive development level. The random forest classifier prediction model showed that age of strabismus onset was an important predictor of attention. Conclusion: Children with IXT have lower visual and auditory attention and control than their peers, and the age of onset of strabismus may be a major factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Importance: Clarifying the relationship between kindergarteners' characteristics and their future handwriting performance is beneficial for the early detection of children at risk of handwriting difficulties. Objective: To determine which visual–perceptual and motor skills and behavioral traits significantly predict kindergartners' Chinese handwriting legibility and speed in the first grade. Design: One-year longitudinal, observational design. Setting: Kindergarten and elementary schools. Participants: One hundred six kindergarten children (53 boys and 53 girls; ages 5 or 6 yr) were recruited. Outcomes and Measures: The participants completed two subtests of the Bruininks–Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency–Second Edition, Test of Visual Perceptual Skills–Third Edition, Beery–Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual–Motor Integration (Beery™ VMI), and the Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Test–Chinese Version in kindergarten. Their handwriting legibility (character accuracy and construction) and speed were assessed by investigator-developed Chinese handwriting tests in the first grade. Results: Multivariate regression analyses indicated the independent predictive power of spatial relationships (p =.042) and inattention (p =.004) for character accuracy. Visual–motor integration (VMI; p =.008) and inattention (p =.002) were the key predictors of character construction. Manual dexterity (p =.001) was the only significant predictor of writing speed. Conclusions and Relevance: Kindergarteners who perform poorly in spatial relationships, VMI, manual dexterity, and attention are likely to have less legible Chinese handwriting and slow writing speed in first grade. Plain-Language Summary: Children's visual–perceptual and motor skills and behavioral traits in kindergarten can predict their Chinese handwriting legibility and speed in first grade. This study found that kindergarteners who performed poorly in spatial relationships, VMI, manual dexterity, and attention were likely to have less legible Chinese handwriting and slow writing speed in the first grade. This study found that kindergarteners who performed poorly in spatial relationships, visual–motor Integration, manual dexterity, and attention were likely to have less legible Chinese handwriting and slow writing speed in the first grade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infants encode the surface features of simple, unfamiliar objects (e.g., red triangle) and the categorical identities of familiar, categorizable objects (e.g., car) into their representations of these objects. We asked whether 16–18‐month‐olds ignore non‐diagnostic surface features (e.g., color) in favor of encoding an object's categorical identity (e.g., car) when objects are from familiar categories. In Experiment 1 (n = 18), we hid a categorizable object inside an opaque box. In No Switch trials, infants retrieved the object that was hidden. In Switch trials, infants retrieved a different object: an object from a different category (Between‐Category‐Switch trials) or a different object from the same category (Within‐Category‐Switch trials). We measured infants' subsequent searching in the box. Infants' pattern of searching suggested that only infants who completed a Within‐Category‐Switch trial as their first Switch trial encoded objects' surface features, and an exploratory analysis suggested that infants who completed a Between‐Category‐Switch trial as their first Switch trial only encoded objects' categories. In Experiment 2 (n = 18), we confirmed that these results were due to objects' categorizability. These results suggest infants may tailor the way they encode categorizable objects depending on which object dimensions are perceived to be task relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 outbreak has led to the closure of educational institutions, which may prevent children from attaining skills essential for learning, such as visual–motor integration (VMI) and visuospatial constructional ability (often reflected with the Block Design Test, BDT). This study compares VMI and BDT performance between a pre-pandemic cohort (children who attended preschool in late 2019) and a post-pandemic cohort (those physically attending preschool for the first time at the end of 2021). Participants were children attending government preschools with similar syllabi catered for low-income families. The pre-pandemic cohort was part of an earlier study (n = 202 for VMI and n = 220 for BDT) before lockdowns commenced in March 2020. The post-pandemic cohort comprised 197 children who completed the Beery-VMI and 93 children who completed the BDT. Compared to the pre-pandemic cohort, the post-pandemic cohort had significantly lower mean Beery-VMI scores (t(397) = 3.054, p = 0.002) and was 3.162-times more likely to have a below average Beery-VMI score (OR = 3.162 (95% CI 1.349, 7.411)). The post-pandemic cohort also had significantly lower BDT scores than the pre-pandemic cohort (t(311) = −5.866, p < 0.001). In conclusion, children with disrupted conventional preschool education due to the COVID-19 lockdowns were more likely to have below-average VMI and lower BDT scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual speech cues from a speaker's talking face aid speech segmentation in adults, but despite the importance of speech segmentation in language acquisition, little is known about the possible influence of visual speech on infants' speech segmentation. Here, to investigate whether there is facilitation of speech segmentation by visual information, two groups of English‐learning 7‐month‐old infants were presented with continuous speech passages, one group with auditory‐only (AO) speech and the other with auditory‐visual (AV) speech. Additionally, the possible relation between infants' relative attention to the speaker's mouth versus eye regions and their segmentation performance was examined. Both the AO and the AV groups of infants successfully segmented words from the continuous speech stream, but segmentation performance persisted for longer for infants in the AV group. Interestingly, while AV group infants showed no significant relation between the relative amount of time spent fixating the speaker's mouth versus eyes and word segmentation, their attention to the mouth was greater than that of AO group infants, especially early in test trials. The results are discussed in relation to the possible pathways through which visual speech cues aid speech perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated how thematic priming via visual and linguistic cues influences the choice of syntactic voice in healthy French-speaking adults and in French-speaking children with typical and atypical development. In particular, we focused on children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and developmental language disorder (DLD), two clinical groups with documented syntactic difficulties. Twenty adults (M= 24;7) and 60 children aged 6–11 (20 typically developing, 20 with DLD and 20 with ADHD) were presented with agent or patient cues that progressively increased in strength over three conditions: a no cue condition, a visual cue condition with two cue types (perceptual vs. referential) and a linguistic cue condition with two cue types (topicalization of the agent/patient with and without subsequent sentence initiation). Results showed that all participants produced more passives after having been presented with a patient cue, regardless of cue type (cue > no cue), but linguistic cues facilitated the production of passives significantly more than visual cues (linguistic cue > visual cue). We also found that children with DLD were more sensitive than children with ADHD to visual cues (DLD > ADHD), which were more implicit than the linguistic cues and may have required more attentional resources. The opposite pattern (ADHD > DLD) was true for the linguistic cues, which required syntactic processing. These findings highlight how the development of dynamic tools using cue modality and cue sensitivity might be useful for discriminating children with and without syntactic impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to explore how youth players' physical, technical and positional performance may be affected by visual occlusion when playing under different SSG pitch sizes. Under-15 players performed two experimental scenarios: a) normal situation, without visual occlusion; b) visual occlusion, by using an eye patch in the eye corresponding to the dominant foot. These scenarios were tested in a small (40x30m) and a larger pitch (50x35m). Players' positional data was used to compute tactical and time-motion variables. In addition, technical analysis was comprised using video footage. Playing with visual occlusion in the larger pitch size induced higher distance covered while walking but lower running distance (p <.05). Although no statistically significant effects were identified between the normal and visual occlusion conditions for the tactical behaviour and technical performance a lower number of successful passes (small to moderate effect sizes) and higher regularity in the distance to the opponent's team centroid (moderate effect size) were found with visual occlusion. Players covered more distance and achieved higher maximum speed in the larger compared to the small pitch (moderate to large effect size, p <.05), while also increasing their distance to both team's centroid and increasing the regularity to these distances (moderate to large effect size, p <.05). Overall, despite similar effects for tactical and technical variables, some important practical information can be depicted. Accordingly, coaches may use the visual occlusion to promote more stable and regular behaviors while decreasing the physical demands. Larger pitches may be used to increase the distance between players' and teams, as well as to induce higher physical load in both the normal and visual occlusion conditions. From the technical perspective, coaches may design smaller pitches to emphasize the use of the non-dominant foot during the occlusion scenario and promote the pass during the normal scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infants' ability to detect statistical regularities between visual objects has been demonstrated in previous studies (e.g., Kirkham et al., Cognition, 83, 2002, B35). The extent to which infants extract and learn the actual values of the transitional probabilities (TPs) between these objects nevertheless remains an open question. In three experiments providing identical learning conditions but contrasting different types of sequences at test, we examined 8‐month‐old infants' ability to discriminate between familiar sequences involving high or low values of TPs, and new sequences that involved null TPs. Results showed that infants discriminate between these three types of sequences, supporting the existence of a statistical learning mechanism by which infants extract fine‐grained statistical information from a stream of visual stimuli. Interestingly, the expression of this statistical knowledge varied between experiments and specifically depended on the nature of the first two test trials. We argue that the predictability of this early test arrangement—namely whether the first two test items were either predictable or unexpected based on the habituation phase—determined infants' looking behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of visual attention suggest a cascading development of subfunctions such as alertness, spatial orientation, attention to object features, and endogenous control. Here, we aimed to track infants' visual developmental steps from a primarily exogenously to more endogenously controlled processing style during their first months of life. In this repeated measures study, 51 infants participated in seven fortnightly assessments at postterm ages of 4–16 weeks. Infants were presented with the same set of static and dynamic paired comparison stimuli in each assessment. Visual behavior was evaluated by a newly introduced scoring scheme. Our results confirmed the suggested visual developmental hierarchy and clearly demonstrated the suitability of our scoring scheme for documenting developmental changes in visual attention during early infancy. Besides the general ontogenetic course of development, we also discuss intra‐ and interindividual differences which may affect single assessments, and highlight the importance of repeated measurements for reliable evaluation of developmental changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies were conducted to explore the effects of differential observing responses (DORs) on vocal tact acquisition in preschool‐age children of typical development. In Study 1 with three participants, an identity‐matching DOR was incorporated into tact instruction trials with novel visual stimuli. Acquisition rates were similar in the DOR condition and in a non‐DOR condition. In Study 2 with five new participants, the identity‐matching DOR was implemented as an intervention when standard discrete‐trial instruction failed to produce acquisition of tacts of compound stimuli. Two participants reached mastery after the identity‐matching DOR was introduced, whereas three participants' progress was unaffected. For those three, the identity‐matching DOR was replaced with a verbal DOR (tacting of stimulus components), but although one participant's correct responding increased, none reached mastery. Two participants ultimately reached mastery after a non‐DOR intervention. Conditions under which DORs facilitate stimulus control outside of MTS tasks remain to be identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observers experience complex patterns of visual motion in daily life due to their own movements through space, the movement of objects, and the geometry of surfaces in the visible world. Motion information shapes behavior and brain activity beginning in infancy. And yet most prior behavioral research has focused on how children process only one type, linear motion, leaving largely unexplored how children respond to radial or rotational motion patterns that co-occur with linear motion in everyday visual experience. This study examined how children and adults detect linear and radial motion patterns corrupted by a range of noise levels. Five to eight-year-old children (n = 25, 16 females; 76% White, 4% Asian, 16% more than one, 4% unknown) and young adults (n = 29, 15 females; 83.33% White, 16.67% Asian) viewed pairs of radial and linear motion displays mixed with random noise at one of two speeds (2 deg/s or 8 deg/s). Participants selected the display with coherent motion. Children and adults showed higher accuracy (percent correct) to radial versus linear motion patterns. Children had higher accuracy to the faster speed, while adults showed the opposite pattern. Adults showed better performance than children in all conditions. Exploratory analyses showed that male children had higher accuracy than their female peers. We conclude that motion processing develops in childhood with separable developmental trajectories for the processing of slow and fast visual motion, and that while further investigation is warranted, sex differences in motion processing found in young and older adults may begin in middle childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Topological property (TP) is a basic geometric attribute of objects, which is preserved over continuous and one-to-one transformations and considered to be processed in early vision. This study investigated the global TP perception of 773 children aged 6-14, as compared to 179 adults. The results revealed that adults and children aged 10 or over show a TP priority trend in both central and peripheral vision, that is, less time is required to discriminate TP differences than non-TP differences. Children aged 6-8 show a TP priority trend for central stimuli, but not in their peripheral vision. The TP priority effect in peripheral vision does not emerge until age ˜10 years, and the development of central and peripheral vision seems to be different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research tests the role of visual perspective taking (VPT) in mediating the relation between spatial ability and theory of mind (ToM). Study 1 demonstrated such mediation correlationally in seventy 3.5‐ to 4‐year olds. In Study 2, twenty‐three 3.5‐ to 4‐year‐olds were trained on using play blocks to copy preassembled models as a way to promote spatial ability. Resultant increases in VPT and ToM were compared to those from a control group learning to draw instead (n = 23). Both studies showed that the effect of spatial ability on ToM depended on VPT, suggesting a role of embodiment in ToM development in early childhood. These findings provide an alternative way to think about ToM development and the psychological mechanism that may be involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed to examine how visual skills, verbal working memory, visuospatial working memory, and other general cognitive skills (inhibitory control, attention, and decision speed) were simultaneously correlated with the early acquisition of reading among kindergarten children. A total of 99 Chinese children were tested individually on the Chinese character recognition task, the block design task, the digit span task, the visuospatial sketchpad task, the continuous performance task (CPT), the flanker task, and the choice reaction time task. The results showed that visual skills and working memory accounted for 15% of the unique variance in character reading, whereas other general cognitive skills, including decision speed, inhibitory control and attention, did not significantly explain the variance in character reading when visual skills and working memory were considered. Specifically, verbal working memory, rather than visuospatial working memory, explained the unique variance in children's learning of character reading. These findings highlighted that visual skills and verbal working memory were among the most important precursors of reading in children at the beginning stage of learning Chinese characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In direct interactions with others, 9-month-old infants' learning about objects is facilitated when the interaction partner addresses the infant through eye contact before looking toward an object. In this study we investigated whether similar factors promote infants' observational learning from third-party interactions, In Experiment 1, 9-month-old typically developing infants from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds from urban Germany (N = 32.13 female) were presented with four types of videos showing one object and two adults. The scenarios varied systematically regarding the eye contact between the adults (eye contact or no eye contact), and the adults' object-directed gaze (looking toward or away from the object). To assess infants' encoding performance we measured their looking times when seeing the familiarized object subsequently next to a novel object, interpreting an enhanced novelty preference as reversely indicating greater encoding of the familiarized object. Infants showed an increased novelty preference, but only after observing a joint attentional setting during which two adults attended to the familiarized object together (following eye contact). In Experiment 2, we found an identical pattern of results in a matched first-party design in which 9-month-old infants (N = 32, 16 female) were directly addressed by one single adult on screen. Infants' encoding was only enhanced when the adult made eye contact with the infant before looking at an object. Together, this suggests that the capacity to learn through observing others' interactions emerges already in the first postnatal year, and that it may depend on similar factors as infants' learning through direct social engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual perspective-taking is the ability to perceive the world from another person's perspective, and research on visual perspective-taking ability in children with autism spectrum conditions yielded inconsistent results. To solve a visual perspective-taking task, people can mentally rotate themselves to another person's location (embodied self-rotation strategy) or else rotate the object toward themselves (object-based mental rotation strategy). Previous interventions for autistic individuals have mainly focused on embodied self-rotation strategy, the visual perspective-taking mechanism in neurotypicals. This study examined the effects of both embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies in improving visual perspective-taking performance in 34 autistic children and 34 ability-matched neurotypical children. All children completed three tasks: one measuring baseline visual perspective-taking performance, while the other two measuring visual perspective-taking performance after instructions in embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies. The results indicated that autistic children had difficulty in baseline visual perspective-taking tasks. After a brief strategy learning period, autistic children benefited similarly from both embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation instructions, suggesting that there are various possible ways to improving autistic children's perspective taking, and that further interventions for autistic children could consider combining different strategies that better suit their autistic traits. When answering how the same object might appear to others in different locations, people can provide answers by mentally putting themselves into another person's location using the embodied self-rotation strategy or by rotating the target object toward themselves using the object-based mental rotation strategy. In this study, after learning the embodied self-rotation or object-based mental rotation strategies, autistic children improved their visual perspective-taking performance, which is believed to be impaired or delayed in autistic individuals. We recruited 34 autistic children and an equal number of ability-matched typical children and examined their visual perspective-taking performance at baseline and after learning the embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies. As previous visual perspective-taking and other social cognition interventions for autistic individuals have primarily focused on the embodied self-rotation strategy, showing moderate effectiveness and limited generalizability, we explored the effects of both embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies for improving perspective-taking performance and discussed their implications in this study. The results showed that autistic children had a lower performance at baseline compared with typical children; however, they were still sensitive to both embodied self-rotation and object-based mental rotation strategies. Unlike typical children, who gained more from the embodied self-rotation strategy, autistic children benefited similarly from the two strategies. This suggests that there are multiple ways to helping autistic children overcome their difficulty in perspective-taking tasks. Future interventions for autistic children could consider combining various strategies that better suit their autistic traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments examined perceptual colocation of visual and tactile stimuli in young infants. Experiment 1 compared 4‐ (n = 15) and 6‐month‐old (n = 12) infants' visual preferences for visual‐tactile stimulus pairs presented across the same or different feet. The 4‐ and 6‐month‐olds showed, respectively, preferences for colocated and noncolocated conditions, demonstrating sensitivity to visual‐tactile colocation on their feet. This extends previous findings of visual‐tactile perceptual colocation on the hands in older infants. Control conditions excluded the possibility that both 6‐ (Experiment 1), and 4‐month‐olds (Experiment 2, n = 12) perceived colocation on the basis of an undifferentiated supramodal coding of spatial distance between stimuli. Bimodal perception of visual‐tactile colocation is available by 4 months of age, that is, prior to the development of skilled reaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the two‐alternative forced‐choice (2AFC) paradigm, manual responses such as pointing have been widely used as measures to estimate cognitive abilities. While pointing measurements can be easily collected, coded, analyzed, and interpreted, absent responses are often observed particularly when adopting these measures for toddler studies, which leads to an increase of missing data. Although looking responses such as preferential looking can be available as alternative measures in such cases, it is unknown how well looking measurements can be interpreted as equivalent to manual ones. This study aimed to answer this question by investigating how accurately pointing responses (i.e., left or right) could be predicted from concurrent preferential looking. Using pre‐existing videos of toddlers aged 18–23 months engaged in an intermodal word comprehension task, we developed models predicting manual from looking responses. Results showed substantial prediction accuracy for both the Simple Majority Vote and Machine Learning‐Based classifiers, which indicates that looking responses would be reasonable alternative measures of manual ones. However, the further exploratory analysis revealed that when applying the created models for data of toddlers who did not produce clear pointing responses, the estimation agreement of missing pointing between the models and the human coders slightly dropped. This indicates that looking responses without pointing were qualitatively different from those with pointing. Bridging two measurements in forced‐choice tasks would help researchers avoid wasting collected data due to the absence of manual responses and interpret results from different modalities comprehensively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The percentage of exclusive breastfeeding in Background Mothers’ visual perception is an important determinant for their children’s nutritional status. Visual perception of their children’s nutritional status is believed to drive mothers to modify or apply certain feeding styles, which influence the probability of either optimal growth or malnutrition. Objective To determine if maternal visual perception of children’s nutritional status influences maternal feeding style. Methods The study was conducted in 3 kindergartens in Medan, North Sumatera, involving children aged 4-5 years and their mothers. Mothers filled three-part questionnaires, consisting of basic information, a series of body image sketches by a graphic artist to assess maternal visual perception, and the Parental Feeding Style Questionnaire (PFSQ) to assess maternal feeding style. Children’s body heights and weights were measured to assess their nutritional status. Results A total of 102 subjects were eligible for this study. Surprisingly, more than half of the mothers involved in our study misinterpreted their children nutritional status. Thus, there was no significant relationship between maternal visual perception, nor maternal misperception, and maternal feeding style. In fact, mothers tended to encourage their children to eat when they considered their children to have normal nutritional status. Conclusion Mothers’ visual perception does not influence feeding practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in many areas of science, infant research suffers from low power. The problem is further compounded in infant research because of the difficulty in recruiting and testing large numbers of infant participants. Researchers have been searching for a solution and, as illustrated by this special section, have been focused on getting the most out of infant data. We illustrate one solution by showing how we can increase power in visual preference tasks by increasing the amount of data obtained from each infant. We discuss issues of power and present work examining how, under some circumstances, power is increased by increasing the precision of measurement. We report the results of a series of simulations based on a sample of visual preference task data collected from three infant laboratories showing how more powerful research designs can be achieved by including more trials per infant. Implications for infant procedures in general are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This pilot study presents the effects on acquisition of pre-writing skills of educational activities targeting visual-motor integration and fine motor skills on a convenient sample of first graders. After a 10-week intervention program, visual perceptual skills and fine motor control were tested on 13 six-year-old aged children. Participants completed the Beery-Buktenica VMI and the manual dexterity scale of the Movement ABC-2 at baseline (T1), after the intervention program (T2), and one month after the end of the educational activities (T3). Children's writing pressure, frequency, and automaticity were measured using a digitizer during the administration of name writing test at T1, T2, and T3. The purpose of the study was to investigate changes in visual-perceptual abilities and fine motor skills after the intervention program and examine correlational effects on children's kinematic writing performances. Findings reveal that educational activities impacted positively on children's visual motor coordination component of writing improving VMI scores. No statistically significant difference was detected across the three time points on students' manual dexterity skills. Measurement of writing kinematics allows to report and document variations in children's writing during intervention. This pilot study discusses these findings and their implications for the field on early childhood acquisition of foundational skills for handwriting. It also proposes potential topics for future research on this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During recent years, many studies have shown that reading difficulties such as dyslexia can co-exist with visual processing deficits. As estimated, 80% of the time, a child learns through the visual channel; any deficits in visual processing may affect learning. While intervention related to phonological deficits is well accepted and practised in Singapore, the possible impact of visual deficits is rarely considered, especially with regard to eye movements and visual perception. Hence, these deficits are usually discovered much later or remain undiagnosed. This study investigates the eye movement performance and visual perception skills in a group of 30 children with dyslexia from the Dyslexia Association of Singapore (DAS) learning centres. The tests used for assessment were the Developmental Eye Movement (DEM) test and the Test of Visual Perceptual Skills (non-motor) 4th Edition (TVPS-4). The data collected were analysed against the normative data. Among the participants, 56.67% of them showed eye movement deficits and 46.67% of them displayed visual perceptual weaknesses. Sixty percent of the parents were aware that their child tends to leave out or confuse words when reading. However, only eleven of the participants had an eye examination by an ophthalmologist or optometrist. Based on the key findings in this study, it is essential to raise awareness among professionals and parents regarding the importance of eye movements and visual perception in children with dyslexia. Any child who shows signs of visual difficulties should be referred for more in-depth visual assessment to identify the actual cause of the difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is mixed evidence concerning whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can infer mental states from the eyes. This study aims to elucidate whether they use less efficient strategies. Sixteen adolescents with ASD (11-16 year olds) were compared to a chronological age- and IQ-matched sample of 16 typically developing (TD) adolescents. Eight mental states were presented as full dynamic faces and in conditions altering the presence of expressive dynamic information from the eyes and mouth. Bayes factors revealed that adolescents with ASD had similar accuracy, response times (less conclusive), and fixations to TD adolescents. Findings imply that adolescents with ASD spontaneously fixate on the eyes, and not all individuals with ASD have difficulties inferring mental states from faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of spatial visual attention has been extensively studied in infants, but far less is known about the emergence of object‐based visual attention. We tested 3–5‐ and 9–12‐month‐old infants on a task that allowed us to measure infants' attention orienting bias toward whole objects when they competed with color, motion, and orientation feature information. Infants' attention orienting to whole objects was affected by the dimension of the competing visual feature. Whether attention was biased toward the whole object or its salient competing feature (e.g., "ball" or "red") changed with age for the color feature, with infants biased toward whole objects with age. Moreover, family socioeconomic status predicted feature‐based attention in the youngest infants and object‐based attention in the older infants when color feature information competed with whole‐object information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foci of visual attention were modeled as a function of perceptual salience, adult fixation locations, and attentional control mechanisms (measured in separate tasks) in infants (N = 45, 3‐ to 15‐month‐olds) as they viewed static real‐world scenes. After controlling for the center bias, the results showed that low‐level perceptual salience predicts where infants look. In addition, high‐level factors also played a role: Infants fixated parts of the scenes frequently fixated by adults and this effect was stronger for older than younger infants. In line with this finding, infant fixation durations were longer on regions more frequently fixated by adults, implying longer time taken to process the available information. Fixation durations decreased with age, and this decline interacted with orienting skills such that fixation durations decreased faster with age for infants with high orienting skills, relative to infants with low orienting skills. There was a further interaction between fixation durations and selective attention abilities: Infants with low selective attention skills showed a decrease in fixation durations with age, whereas infants with higher selective attention skills showed a slight increase in fixation durations with age. These findings imply that infants' visual processing of static real‐world stimuli develops in accord with attentional control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether a new oculomotor serial reaction time (RT) task revealed statistical sequence learning in young children. Method: We used eye tracking to measure typically developing children's oculomotor RTs in response to cartoon-like creatures that appeared successively in quadrants of a monitor during 200 trials: an initial patterned phase (120 trials) in which the creature's location reflected 15 repetitions of an 8-element sequence, a pseudorandom phase (40 trials) in which the location was not predictable, and a final patterned phase (40 trials). In an auditory-visual version of the task, spoken nonwords linked to quadrants preceded the creature's appearance. In Study 1, we administered either the visual or the auditory-visual version to 5- and 6-year-old children; in Study 2, we examined the performance of 4-year-olds on the auditory-visual version. Results: In both studies, group mean RT z scores were significantly shorter (p < .05) during patterned than pseudorandom phases, with large effect sizes (Cohen's dz values = 1.17-1.79). Conclusion: The new oculomotor serial RT task detected statistical sequence learning in typically developing children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parent–child interactions are multimodal, often involving coordinated exchanges of visual and auditory information between the two partners. The current work focuses on the effect of children's hearing loss on parent–child interactions when parents and their toddlers jointly played with a set of toy objects. We compared the linguistic input received by toddlers with hearing loss (HL) and their chronological age‐matched (CA) and hearing age‐matched (HA) normal‐hearing peers. Moreover, we used head‐mounted eye trackers to examine how different parental linguistic input affected children's visual attention on objects when parents either led or followed children's attention during joint object play. Overall, parents of children with HL provided comparable amount of linguistic input as parents of the two normal‐hearing groups. However, the types of linguistic input produced by parents of children with HL were similar to the CA group in some ways and similar to the HA group in other ways. Interestingly, the effects of different types of linguistic input on extending the attention of children with HL qualitatively resembled the patterns seen in the CA group, even though the effects were less pronounced in the HL group. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the reciprocal, dynamic, and multi‐factored nature of parent–child interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infants can infer agents' goals after observing agents' goal‐directed actions on objects and can subsequently make predictions about how agents will act on objects in the future. We investigated the representations supporting these predictions. We familiarized 6‐month‐old infants to an agent who preferentially reached for one of two featurally distinct objects following a cue. At test, the objects were sequentially occluded from the infant in the agent's presence. We asked whether infants could generate action predictions without visual access to the relevant objects by measuring whether infants shifted their gaze to the location of the agent's hidden goal object following the cue. We also examined what infants represented about the hidden objects by removing one of the occluders to reveal either the original hidden object or the unexpected other object and measuring infants' looking time. We found that, even without visual access to the objects, infants made predictive gazes to the location of the agent's occluded goal object, but failed to represent the features of either hidden object. These results suggest that infants make goal‐based action predictions when the relevant objects in the scene are occluded, but doing so may come at the expense of maintaining representations of the objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examined how caregiver experience (female primary caregiver or distributed caregiving with mom and dad) influenced 10‐, 14‐, and 16‐month‐olds' visual preferences and attention toward internal facial features of female–male face pairs, and how these behaviors related to novelty preferences in a face recognition task and speed and accuracy on a visual search task. In the visual preference task, infants visually preferred male faces, regardless of caregiver experience. Despite similarities in visual preferences, infants' attention toward females and males' internal facial features was related for infants with distributed caregiving only. Infants' performance across face processing tasks most often correlated for those with female primary caregivers. Results further our understanding of how infants with female primary caregivers display specialized processing of female faces, and how infants with distributed caregiving show similarities in their attention to female and male facial features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The uncertainty of reference has long been considered a key challenge for young word learners. Recent studies of head camera wearing toddlers and their parents during object play have revealed that from toddlers' views, the referents of parents' object naming are often visually quite clear. Although these studies have promising theoretical implications, they were all conducted in stripped‐down laboratory contexts. The current study examines the visual referential clarity of parents' object naming during play in the home. Results revealed patterns of visual referential clarity that resembled previous laboratory studies. Furthermore, context analyses show that such clarity is largely a product of manual activity rather than the object naming context. Implications for the mechanisms of early word learning are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments explored how well children recognize events from different types of visual experience: either by directly seeing an event or by indirectly experiencing it from post-event visual evidence. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5- to 6-year-old Turkish-speaking children (n = 32) successfully recognized events through either direct or indirect visual access. In Experiment 2, a new group of 4- and 5- to 6-year-olds (n = 37) reliably attributed event recognition to others who had direct or indirect visual access to events (even though performance was lower than Experiment 1). In both experiments, although children's accuracy improved with age, there was no difference between the two types of access. Experiment 3 replicated the findings from the youngest participants of Experiments 1 and 2 with a matched sample of English-speaking 4-year-olds (n = 37). Thus children can use different kinds of visual experience to support event representations in themselves and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In human infants, the ability to share attention with others is facilitated by increases in attentional selectivity and focus. Differences in early attention have been associated with socio‐cognitive outcomes including language, yet the social mechanisms of attention organization in early infancy have only recently been considered. Here, we examined how social coordination between 5‐month‐old infants and caregivers relate to differences in infant attention, including looking preferences, span, and reactivity to caregivers' social cues. Using a naturalistic play paradigm, we found that 5‐month‐olds who received a high ratio of sensitive (jointly focused) contingent responses showed strong preferences for objects with which their caregivers were manually engaged. In contrast, infants whose caregivers exhibited high ratios of redirection (attempts to shift focus) showed no preferences for caregivers' held objects. Such differences have implications for recent models of cognitive development, which rely on early looking preferences for adults' manually engaged objects as a pathway toward joint attention and word learning. Further, sensitivity and redirectiveness predicted infant attention even in reaction to caregiver responses that were non‐referential (neither sensitive nor redirective). In response to non‐referentials, infants of highly sensitive caregivers oriented less frequently than infants of highly redirective caregivers, who showed increased distractibility. Our results suggest that specific dyadic exchanges predict infant attention differences toward broader social cues, which may have consequences for social‐cognitive outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]