Overturning Children's Misconceptions about Ruler Measurement: The Power of Disconfirming Evidence.

Children have persistent difficulty with foundational measurement concepts, which may be linked to the instruction they receive. Here, we focus on testing various ways to support their understanding that rulers comprise spatial interval units. We examined whether evidence-based learning tools-disconfirming evidence and/or structural alignment-enhance their understanding of ruler units.

Developmental changes in natural scene viewing in infancy.

We extend decades of research on infants' visual processing by examining their eye gaze during viewing of natural scenes. We examined the eye movements of a racially diverse group of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 54; 27 boys; 24 infants were White and not Hispanic, 30 infants were African American, Asian American, mixed race and/or Hispanic) as they viewed images selected from the MIT Saliency Benchmark Project. In general, across this age range infants' fixation distributions became more consistent and more adult-like, suggesting that infants' fixations in natural scenes become increasingly more systematic.

Typical Levels of Eye-Region Fixation in Toddlers With Autism Spectrum Disorder Across Multiple Contexts.

Objective: Unusual eye contact is a common clinical feature in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet eye-tracking studies that quantify eye fixation report inconsistent results, possibly because of small samples, varied stimuli, and considerable heterogeneity of eye-region fixation even within typical development. Goals were to examine eye-region fixation levels in a large, very young cohort; the degree to which the presence of speech, hand gestures, and a geometric distractor influence eye-region fixation; and possible developmental changes across time.

Method: In experiment 1, 385 toddlers (143 with ASD, 242 without ASD, 11-47 months old) watched an actress engaging in child-directed speech with hand gestures against a plain background.

Basic auditory processing in the children with autistic features.

This study aimed inhibition mechanisms of auditory processing in the group with autistic features. Thirty-two children (autistic group = 16, typically developing [TD] group = 16) received neuropsychological tests, IQ test and experimental tasks. Both groups showed similar performances except the processing speed index.

Learning to measure through action and gesture: Children's prior knowledge matters.

Learning through physical action with mathematical manipulatives is an effective way to help children acquire new ideas and concepts. Gesture is a type of physical action, but it differs from other kinds of actions in that it does not involve interacting directly with external objects. As such, gesture provides an interesting comparison to action-on-objects and allows us to identify the circumstances under which gesture versus interaction with objects (and the associated effects on the external world) may be differentially beneficial to learning.

The development of visual search in infancy: Attention to faces versus salience.

Four experiments examined how faces compete with physically salient stimuli for the control of attention in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants (N = 117 total). Three computational models were used to quantify physical salience. We presented infants with visual search arrays containing a face and familiar object(s), such as shoes and flowers.

Visual short-term memory for complex objects in 6- and 8-month-old infants.

Infants' visual short-term memory (VSTM) for simple objects undergoes dramatic development: Six-month-old infants can store in VSTM information about only a simple object presented in isolation, whereas 8-month-old infants can store information about simple objects presented in multiple-item arrays. This study extended this work to examine the development of infants' VSTM for complex objects during this same period (N = 105). Using the simultaneous streams change detection paradigm, Experiment 1 confirmed the previous developmental trajectory between 6 and 8 months.