These findings point to both delay and deviance in WS face processing and illustrate how vital it is to build developmental trajectories for each specific task.

Children's understanding of intelligent artifacts such as computers and robots poses an interesting problem. Such objects display ‘cognitive’ features in that they have a memory and could be said to reason, as well as behavioural features such as speech and movement (robots). We report the attributional judgements of 5‐ to 11‐year‐old children to a person, robot, computer, doll and book—objects with differential anthropomorphic similarity. Specific questions were: (1) would subjects be prepared to attribute a brain to intelligent artifacts? (2) what kinds of cues were relevant? (3) where was the brain located? (4) what was the brain made of? Subjects of all ages gave accurate attributions for the presence of brain to the person, to the book and, after 5, to the doll. Five‐year‐olds were unwilling to attribute a brain to both intelligent artifacts but older children typically did so. Location and composition data show a gradual development of accuracy. The results indicate that, by 7, children have some understanding of the intelligent nature of the artifacts.

The domain of figurative language comprehension was used to probe the developmental relation between language and cognition in typically developing individuals and individuals with Williams syndrome. Extending the work of Vosniadou and Ortony (1983), the emergence of non-literal similarity and category knowledge was investigated in 117 typically developing children aged between 4 and 12, 19 typically developing adults, 15 children with Williams syndrome between 5 and 12 years of age, and 8 adults with Williams syndrome. Participants were required to complete similarity and categorization statements by selecting one of two words (e.g., either "The sun is like...?" or "The sun is the same kind of thing as...?") with word pairs formed from items that were literally, perceptually, or functionally similar to the target word, or else anomalous (e.g., 'moon', 'orange', 'oven', or 'chair', respectively). Results indicated that individuals with Williams syndrome may access different, less abstract knowledge in figurative language comparisons, despite the relatively strong verbal abilities found in this disorder. 3Although metaphor and analogy have traditionally been viewed as a relatively rare linguistic ornament that complement literal language, recent research suggests that metaphorical language is, in fact, commonplace in everyday communication (e.g., Graesser, Long & Mio, 1989;Pollio, Barlow, Fine & Pollio, 1977). For example, various strands of linguistic evidence suggest that metaphor is important for communicating, and perhaps reasoning, about abstract concepts (e.g. Gibbs, 1994;Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Understanding metaphorical language necessitates certain degrees of proficiency in both cognition and language, and relies on several component abilities, such as processing capacity, metalinguistic skill, an understanding of communicative pragmatics and semantic knowledge (see Vosniadou, 1987aVosniadou, , 1987b.Although definitions of what constitutes a metaphorical comparison vary considerably (e.g., Bowdle & Gentner, 2005), it seems uncontroversial that understanding verbal metaphor involves accessing some similarity between two terms, while recognizing that two terms belong to different conventional categories. This, of course, necessitates knowledge of such categories. If so, then one can take an initial step in ascertaining whether children are capable of understanding metaphor at a given stage in development by investigating their ability to understand non-literal similarity statements, that is, that items that fall in different semantic or conceptual categories can nevertheless be similar in certain ways. Vosniadou and Ortony (1983) required children between the ages of 3 and 6, as well as adults, to complete similarity statements by selecting one of two words from either (1) a metaphorical/literal pair of alternatives, (2) a literal/anomalous pair, or (3), a metaphorical/anomalous pair. For example, the experimenter would say "A river is like a...?" and the participant was required to respond with...

Previous studies have shown that when newborn and young infants are shown attractive and unattractive adult faces they will look longer at the attractive faces. Three studies with infants ranging from 5 months to 15 months were conducted to examine whether this attractiveness effect holds for infants looking at infant faces. A standard preferential looking technique was used in which infants were shown pairs of colour slides of upright (Experiments 1 and 2, n = 16) or inverted (Experiment 3, n = 16) infant faces previously rated by adults for attractiveness. Although Experiment 1 did not reveal an attractiveness effect, this effect did become manifest in Experiment 2 after increasing stimulus exposure time and replacing three of the original stimulus faces. The attractiveness effect was lost when faces were presented upside down. Findings are discussed in relation to the feature-based vs. configural processing debate in the face processing literature and in relation to the notion that attractiveness is based on presexual maturity rather than “cuteness”.

Children aged 5 to 11 years and a comparison group of adults were presented with two instances where the behaviour of a computational object was contrary to what might normally be expected of such a device. In both instances ndings are discussed with regard to children's understanding of a computer program and resulting computational behaviour generally. In the rst study, children viewed a lm featuring a number of robots either acting as traditionally programmed devices or, alternatively, with apparent intentionality. We examine to what extent, if at all, children were aware of this difference. Findings indicated that although the younger children mentioned other alleged differences between the robots, the issue of different loci of control was not a salient one. In the second study, children were encouraged to type two kinds of questions into a computer. The rst kind (simple maths questions) required a general solution procedure commonly accessible to a computational object. The second (details of a biographical nature) did not. With respect to the rst as well as the second kind of questions the computer was seen to provide apparently correct answers. Findings showed that although with increasing age children were better at articulating the difference between rote-and rule-generated solutions generally, this was not generally accompanied by an accurate assessment of the kinds of problems that could normally be expected to be solved by a computer.