Attention is widely considered a core process of Executive Function (EF), but it is not clear if it is a separable or integral component of EF in preschool children. Preschool children (n=137) completed a battery of tasks which included EF (i.e., response inhibition, working memory) and attentional control (AC) processes (i.e., sustained attention, selective attention). Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) indicated that a two-factor model with EF and AC as separate factors fit the data better than a unitary one-factor model. These findings are consistent with the view that EF and AC are developing at different rates during the preschool years, and thus are not yet fully integrated in the processing of information. The implications of how EF and AC should be conceptualized in early childhood are discussed.

In order to process the reduced information in pointlight images of human movement, observers rely upon general processing heuristics as well as representations more specific to human gait This paper explores changes in the perception of structure from motion in young infants. W e re-examined data from 17 experiments, involving infants of 3- and S-months old, to determine which stimulus features of pointlight motion infants use to organize percepts, and how perception changes. By combining discrimination and encoding information w e provide a picture of developing perceptual processes. Five-month-olds encode the stimuli more quickly than 3-month-olds, while the younger infants discriminate pairs of stimuli more frequently. Infants of both ages use phase information to discriminate displays. Three-month olds discriminate canonical forms from modified forms when the stimuli are organized about a vertical axis, whereas S-month olds discriminate these f a m s only when one of the figures take on a human-like configuration. These results support a view in which differential skill in what is encoded characterizes development Furthermore, this work may help guide the integration of theory-formation models with heuristic and constraint-based models, into a more complete account of perception.

The n-back task is one of the most popular methods forstudying working memory, and it is tested witheither auditory or visual stimuli. Previous researchcomparing stimulus modalities has demonstrated that auditoryand visual tasks often elicit differential responding and,potentially, different underlying cognitive processes. In thisstudy, performance accuracy and response time weremeasured during an n-back task that varied in termsof stimulus modality and difficulty. Findings demonstrate thatparticipants respond faster but less accurately during a visualas compared to an auditory condition where participants aremore accurate but slower to respond. These results arediscussed in terms of dual coding and feature binding.Implications for the presentation of n-back tasks in studies ofworking memory are discussed.

Social interaction involves cues such as gaze direction, headorientation, and pointing gestures that serve to automaticallyorient attention to a specific referent or spatial location. In thispaper we demonstrate that an observed reaching actionsimilarly results in a reflexive shift in attention as evidencedby faster responses that are congruent with the direction of thereach, than responses that are incongruent. This facilitation isevident quickly after the onset of the reach action and is dueto the rapid prediction of the reach-goal. When the taskinvolves a saccadic response (Experiment 1) this prediction isinhibited and results in a reverse-congruence, faster responsesto incongruent than congruent cues, when the cue occurs afterthe reach is completed. This reverse-congruence is not presentwhen the task involves a key press (Experiment 2) or a mousemovement (Experiment 3). We propose that the inhibition ofthe predictive saccade is overcome when the eye movementstoward the goal are activated to guide the mouse movement.The three experiments together demonstrate that automaticattention distribution and its effects on behavior depend onthe response.

Predictive Processing (PP) has been suggested to account for early cognitive development (Köster et al., 2020). In this paper, we extend its application to early social coordination in parent-infant interactions. Interpersonal neural synchrony in parent-child interactions is hypothesized to be a function of the coupling of internal generative models for mutual prediction. By aligning these internal models and reducing prediction errors, social uncertainty is reduced, and interpersonal neural synchrony is enhanced. Support for this hypothesis is provided by assessing neural synchrony during mother-infant interaction.

In a world that relies increasingly on large amounts of data and on powerful Machine Learning (ML) models, the veracity of decisions made by these systems is essential. Adversarial samples are inputs that have been perturbed to mislead the in- terpretation of the ML and are a dangerous vulnerability. Our research takes a first step into what can be an important innova- tion in cognitive science: we analyzed human’s judgments and decisions when confronted with targeted (inputs constructed to make a ML model purposely misclassify an input as some- thing else) and non-targeted (a noisy perturbed input that tries to trick the ML model) adversarial samples. Our findings sug- gest that although ML models that produce non-targeted adver- sarial samples can be more efficient than targeted samples they result in more incorrect human classifications than those of tar- geted samples. In other words, non-targeted samples interfered more with human perception and categorization decisions than targeted samples.