The cognitive neuroscience of visual working memory

Visual working memory allows us to temporarily maintain and manipulate visual information in order to solve a task. The study of the brain mechanisms underlying this function began more than half a century ago, with Scoville and Milner’s (1957) seminal discoveries with amnesic patients. This timely collection of papers brings together diverse perspectives on the cognitive neuroscience of visual working memory from multiple fields that have traditionally been fairly disjointed: human neuroimaging, electrophysiological, behavioural and animal lesion studies, investigating both the developing and the adult brain

Editorial: the cognitive neuroscience of visual working memory, Volume II

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Can infants categorize scenes?

Human adults are extremely good at inferring the overall meaning of scenes in a single glanceÑtheir gistÑsuch as "a park" or "a kitchen". However, little is known about categorical knowledge of scenes and the extraction of scene gist in development. In two preferential-looking experiments, we investigated whether 12- and 18-month-old infants categorize scenes based on gist and the role that verbal input plays in extracting such conceptual commonality. Whereas 12-month-olds showed no evidence of scene categorization, 18-month-olds categorized scenes when the images were presented with a label void of meaning in the familiarization phase. The observed facilitating effect of language on categorization, previously already shown in studies with objects, seems to emerge at a later age for scenes, possibly due to their inherent complexity. Our findings show for the first time that by the age of 18 months, infants can categorize visual scenes based on abstract commonalities

The pupil collaboration: A multi-lab, multi-method analysis of goal attribution in infants

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Improving the generalizability of infant psychological research: The ManyBabies model

Yarkoni's analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to diversification, and focused on understanding sources of variation