Catarina Vales

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Department of Psychology

In this paper, we decompose sustained attending behavior into components of continuous attention maintenance and attentional transitions and study how each of these components develops in young children. Our results in two experiments suggest that changes in children's ability to return attention to a target locus after distraction (“Returning”) pl...

Remote data collection procedures can strengthen developmental science by addressing current limitations to in-person data collection and helping recruit more diverse and larger samples of participants. Thus, remote data collection opens an opportunity for more equitable and more replicable developmental science. However, it remains an open questio...

Organized semantic representations encoding across- and within-domain distinctions are a hallmark of mature cognition, and understanding how they change with experience and learning is a key endeavor in developmental science. Existing computational modeling studies provide a mechanistic framework for understanding how structured semantic representa...

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated t...

Organized semantic networks reflecting distinctions within and across domains of knowledge are critical for higher‐level cognition. Thus, understanding how semantic structure changes with experience is a fundamental question in developmental science. This study probed changes in semantic structure in 4–6 year‐old children (N = 29) as a result of pa...

A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co‐activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by...

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated t...

A large literature shows strong developmental links between early language abilities and later cognitive abilities. We present evidence for one pathway by which language may influence cognition and development: by influencing how visual information is momentarily processed. Children were asked to identify a target in clutter and either saw a visual...

Known words can guide visual attention, affecting how information is sampled. How do novel words, those that do not provide any top-down information, affect preschoolers' visual sampling in a conceptual task? We proposed that novel names can also change visual sampling by influencing how long children look. We investigated this possibility by analy...

Do words cue children's visual attention, and if so, what are the relevant mechanisms? Across four experiments, 3-year-old children (N = 163) were tested in visual search tasks in which targets were cued with only a visual preview versus a visual preview and a spoken name. The experiments were designed to determine whether labels facilitated search...

Word learning poses a referential problem: when a label is presented, there are potentially many objects in view, each with several different properties that may or may not be relevant to the category being learned by the child. Most theories of word learning solved this problem by proposing that children have language-specific knowledge that guide...

We aimed to describe the temporal trends of the mean blood pressure and prevalence of hypertension in studies that evaluated Portuguese adults. Pubmed was searched and 42 eligible studies were identified. Reference screening and data extraction were conducted independently by two researchers. We fitted linear regression models to compute ecological...