Zsuzsa Kaldy

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Massachusetts Boston

Most work on working memory development has children remember a set of items as well as they can. However, this approach sidesteps the extended mind, the integration of external information with memory. Indeed, adults prefer to use external resources (e.g., lists, models) but will remember more as the cost to access them increases. Here, in our sho...

There are concerns that reliance on external resources (e.g., information on digital devices) may be harmful to our own internal memory. Here, in a pre-registered study, we investigated how the reliability of an external resource (i.e., whether the information will be available when needed) affects young children’s use of it. In our tablet-based Sh...

Most work in the last 50 years on visual working memory and attention has used a classic psychophysical setup: participants are instructed to attend to, or remember, a set of items. This setup sidesteps the role of cognitive control; effort is maximal, tasks are simple, and strategies are limited. While this approach has yielded important insights,...

Most work on working memory development has children remember a set of items as well as they can. However, this approach sidesteps the Extended Mind, the integration of external information with memory. Indeed, adults prefer to use external resources (lists, models) but will remember more as the ‘cost’ to access them increases. Here, in our Shoppin...

Proactive interference (PI) occurs when previously learned information impairs memory for more recently learned information. Most PI studies have employed verbal stimuli, while the role of PI in visual working memory (VWM) has had relatively little attention. In the verbal domain, Johansson and colleagues (2018) found that pupil diameter – a real-t...

Formal school is full of new demands for young children. In this new environment, children need to pay attention for longer periods, acquire knowledge and skills, and inhibit impulsive responses. Does this massive training program improve domain-general cognitive abilities over and above age-related maturation? Prior work leverages a “natural exper...

Public Significance Statement Performing tasks requires the constant updating of working memory (WM), which is especially challenging when previously relevant memories interfere with current ones (“Did I add a teaspoon of salt already, or was that the baking powder?”). In adults, this proactive interference (PI) has been well established as a funda...

The rise of pupillometry in infant research over the last decade is associated with a variety of methods for data preprocessing and analysis. Although pupil diameter is increasingly recognized as an alternative measure of the popular cumulative looking time approach used in many studies (Jackson & Sirois, 2022), an open question is whether the many...

In complex, naturalistic tasks such as building a model, adults can strategically choose whether to refer to sources of visual information or to make the effort to store information in working memory, if re-accessing the visual world is costly (Ballard et al., 1995; Draschkow et al., 2021). 8-10-year-olds show a similar tradeoff (Kenderla & Kibbe,...

Much of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants’ visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants’ visual preferences are poorly understood, an...

While it has been shown that alpha frequency increases over development (Stroganova et al., 1999), a precise trajectory has not yet been specified, making it challenging to constrain theories linking alpha rhythms to perceptual development. We conducted a comprehensive review of studies measuring resting-state occipital peak alpha frequency (PAF, t...

Working memory (WM), the ability to maintain information in service to a task, is characterized by its limited capacity. Several influential models attribute this limitation in a large extent to proactive interference (PI), the phenomenon that previously encoded, now‐irrelevant information competes with relevant information. Here, we look back at t...

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 di...

The most influential effect of Csaba Pléh’s mentoring on me was what I here will call “taking the historian’s stance”. I describe three of our empirical projects that were directly shaped by the historian’s stance: one on iconic memory, a second one on story recall, and our most recent one on mental effort. Then, in the appendix, I recollect some o...

Working Memory (WM), the ability to maintain information in service to a task, is characterized by its limited capacity. Several influential models attribute this limitation in a large extent to proactive interference (Anderson & Neely, 1996; Bunting, 2006; Kane & Engle, 2000), the phenomenon that previously encoded, now-irrelevant information comp...

The dominant frequency of neural oscillations of the occipital, adult human brain is 8-12 Hz, denoted as the alpha frequency (Berger, 1929). These rhythms have been implicated in aspects of vision, specifically temporal processing (Samaha & Postle, 2015). In infants, a functional and topographical analog of the adult alpha rhythm was identified, bu...

Verbal labels have been shown to help preverbal infants’ performance on various cognitive tasks, such as categorization. Redundant labels also aid adults’ visual working memory (WM), but it is not known if this linguistic benefit extends to preverbal infants’ WM. In two eye-tracking studies, we tested whether 8- and 10-month-old infants’ WM perform...

Verbal labels have been shown to help preverbal infants’ performance on various cognitive tasks, such as categorization. Redundant labels also aid adults’ visual working memory (WM), but it is not known if this linguistic benefit extends to preverbal infants’ WM. In two eye-tracking studies, we tested whether 8- and 10-month-old infants’ WM perform...

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 di...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience differences in visual temporal processing, the part of vision responsible for parsing continuous input into discrete objects and events. Here we investigated temporal processing in 2‐year‐old toddlers diagnosed with ASD and age‐matched typically developing (TD) toddlers. We used a visual se...

Working memory allows people to manipulate information in support of ongoing tasks and provides a work space for cognitive processes such as learning, reasoning, and decision making. How well working memory works depends, in part, on effort. Someone who pays attention at the right time and place will have better memory and improved performance on m...

Visual memory for objects has been studied extensively in infants over the past 20 years, however, little is known about how they are formed when objects are embedded in naturalistic scenes. In adults, memory for objects in a scene show information accumulation over time as well as persistence despite interruptions (Melcher, 2001, 2006). In the pre...

Infants' ability to remember objects and their locations emerges during the first year of life. However, not much is known about infants' ability to track objects' identities in a dynamic environment. Here, we tailored the delayed match retrieval eye-tracking paradigm to study infants' ability to track two object identities during occlusion-an infa...

The visual system must organize dynamic input into useful percepts across time, balancing between stability and sensitivity to change. The temporal integration window (TIW) has been hypothesized to underlie this balance: If two or more stimuli fall within the same TIW, they are integrated into a single percept; those that fall in different windows...

Attention turns looking, into seeing. Yet, little developmental research has examined the interface of attention and visual working memory (VWM), where what is seen is maintained for use in ongoing visual tasks. Using the task-evoked pupil response – a sensitive, real-time, involuntary measure of focused attention that has been shown to correlate w...

The development of executive function is necessary for flexible and voluntary control of behavior. Deficits in executive function are purported to be a primary cause of behavioral inflexibility—a core clinical symptom—in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Attentional set-shifting has traditionally been measured with the Dimensional Change Card Sort, h...

This study examined if two-year-olds with ASD can update mental representations on the basis of verbal input. In an eye-tracking study, toddlers with ASD and typically-developing nonverbal age-matched controls were exposed to visual or verbal information about a change in a recently encoded scene, followed by an outcome that was either congruent or...

This study examined if two-year-olds with ASD can update mental representations on the basis of verbal input. In an eye-tracking study, toddlers with ASD and typically-developing nonverbal age-matched controls were exposed to visual or verbal information about a change in a recently encoded scene, followed by an outcome that was either congruent or...

Preschool-age children show essentialism (Gelman, 2003), ascribing an essence to an object that includes its history, and which can determine behavior. While infants show the precursors of essentialism, such as maintaining object representations during naturalistic occlusion (6-month-olds; Kaufman, Csibra, & Johnson, 2005), and resisting individuat...

This study examined the predictive reasoning abilities of typically developing (TD) infants and 2-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in an eye-tracking paradigm. Participants watched a video of a goal-directed action in which a human actor reached for and grasped one of two objects. At test, the objects switched locations. Across...

Attentional control enables us to direct our limited resources to accomplish goals. The ability to flexibly allocate resources helps prioritize information and inhibit irrelevant/distracting information. We examined developmental changes in visual working memory (VWM) fidelity in 4-7-year-old children and the effects that a distracting non-target o...

What drives infants’ attention in complex visual scenes? Early models of infant attention suggested that the degree to which different visual features were detectable determines their attentional priority. Here, we tested this by asking whether two targets—defined by different features, but each equally salient when evaluated independently—would dr...

Research Topic in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.

Introduction: Selective attention plays a pivotal role in what information enters our working memory. Following the design of Huang & Sekuler (2010), we investigated how task-irrelevant information (a distractor item presented during memory maintenance) can impact the fidelity of visual working memory (VWM) representations in 4-7-year-old children...

Introduction. Development brings improvements in visual working memory performance, but it is not clear whether this is caused by an increase in memory capacity per se, or by increases in cognitive effort and/or task engagement. Through pupillometric measures and behavioral coding of task engagement during a Delayed Match Retrieval task (Kaldy, Gui...

The dominant view of children's memory is that it is slow to develop and is inferior to adults’. Here we pitted 4-year-old children against adults in a test of verbatim recall of verbal material. Parents read a novel rhyming verse (and an integrated word list) as their child's bedtime story on ten consecutive days. A group of young adults listened...

The capacity to use language to form new representations and to revise existing knowledge is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Here we examined whether infants can use language to adjust their representation of a recently encoded scene. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we asked whether 16-month-old infants (N = 26; mean age = 16;0 [months;days],...

Current neuroscientific models describe the functional neural architecture of visual working memory (VWM) as an interaction of the frontal-parietal control network and more posterior areas in the ventral visual stream (Jonides et al., 2008; D'Esposito and Postle, 2015; Eriksson et al., 2015). These models are primarily based on adult neuroimaging s...

A prominent hypothesis holds that 'sticky' attention early in life in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) limits their ability to explore and learn about the world. Under this hypothesis, the core clinical symptoms of ASD - restricted interests, repetitive behaviors and impaired social/communication abilities - could all result from impair...

We tested 8- and 10-month-old infants' visual working memory (VWM) for object-location bindings - what is where - with a novel paradigm, Delayed Match Retrieval, that measured infants' anticipatory gaze responses (using a Tobii T120 eye tracker). In an inversion of Delayed-Match-to-Sample tasks and with inspiration from the game Memory, in test tri...

Background: Previously, we found that 2-year-old toddlers with ASD are much better at visual search than age-matched typically developing (TYP) toddlers (Kaldy et al., 2011, Dev Sci), primarily because they had greater attentional focus (shown by pupillometry, Blaser et al., under revision). The current study directly tested the idea of whether tod...

Introduction: Previous research has suggested that changes in pupil diameter reflect mental effort in verbal short-term memory tasks, dilating with increases in memory load and constricting during recall (Kahneman & Beatty, 1966, Science). We sought to describe the relationship between mental effort and performance in a visual short-term memory tas...

Research on the neural underpinnings of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has focussed primarily on impairments of social interaction and communication. Less is known though about the second diagnostic criterion of restricted behaviors and interests. Uniquely in this domain, alongside impairments stands an 'ASD advantage' characterised by superior per...

A number of studies have demonstrated that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are faster or more successful than typically developing control participants at various visual-attentional tasks (for reviews, see Dakin and Frith in Neuron 48:497-507, 2005; Simmons et al. in Vis Res 49:2705-2739, 2009). This "ASD advantage" was first iden...

Background / Purpose: Understanding the steps of information processing can provide greater insight into the nature of memory capacity. Iconic memory serves as one of the intermediary steps between sensory perception and short-term memory and is defined as the period from 200ms to 500ms after perceiving a visual stimulus. Using a partial report m...

In this study, 6-month-old infants' visual working memory for a static feature (color) and a dynamic feature (rotational motion) was compared. Comparing infants' use of different features can only be done properly if experimental manipulations to those features are equally salient (Kaldy & Blaser, 2009; Kaldy, Blaser, & Leslie, 2006). The interdime...

Background / Purpose: Recently, we found that toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are much better than age-matched, typically developing controls at feature conjunction visual search. But how does the ASD group achieve superior performance? Main conclusion: Pupillometry indicates that toddlers with ASD do not try harder, they are just...

Plaisted, O'Riordan and colleagues (Plaisted, O'Riordan & Baron-Cohen, 1998; O'Riordan, 2004) showed that school-age children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are faster at finding targets in certain types of visual search tasks than typical controls. Currently though, there is very little known about the visual search skills of very...

By the late 19th century, tests of adults' shortterm visual memory—how much one retains from a briefly presented display—had acquired a familiar character: An alphanumeric array was presented, removed, and participants were asked to report the items (Wundt, 1912). These ‘whole report’ tests revealed capacities of 3-4 items (Cattell, 1886; Sperling,...

HYPOTHESIS: Basic visual functions develop rapidly during the first year of life. Since infants' endogenous attention system is not yet quite matured, visual salience has an almost exclusive role in controlling their visual attention. However, no previous research has attempted to systematically study the relationship between detectability and sali...

Background. Research on infant cognition has long been concerned with how infants process static vs. moving objects (e.g. Van de Walle & Spelke, 1996; Rakison & Poulin-Dubois, 2002). We are interested in comparing infants' visual working memory (VWM) for speed and luminance. Here we focus on our revised ‘salience-mapping’ technique (Kaldy & Blaser,...

Introduction: ‘Whole report’ tests underestimate memory capacity; the crucial innovation was the partial report (Sperling, 1960). However, typical same/different tests of infants' memory - where infants' reactions are tested when a change is made to a set of objects, say, while briefly occluded or invisible - amount to whole report. Purpose: Adapt...

BACKGROUND: The question of whether infants can use one visual feature developmentally before another can only be studied legitimately if manipulations to those features are equally salient (Kaldy, Blaser, & Leslie, 2006). Our ‘Interdimensional Salience Mapping’ method allowed us to generate three comparison objects whose salience difference from a...

HYPOTHESIS: Basic visual functions develop rapidly during the first year of life. Since infants' endogenous attention system is not yet quite matured, salience has an almost exclusive role in controlling their visual attention. However, there has been little research on the relationship between detectability and salience in infants, or on the relat...

Background: Studies by Plaisted, O'Riordan and colleagues have shown that older children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are faster at finding targets in feature conjunction search displays (Plaisted, O'Riordan & Baron-Cohen, 1998; O'Riordan, Plaisted, Driver & Baron-Cohen, 2001). Currently, there is very little known about the visu...

What kind of featural information do infants rely on when they are trying to recognize a previously seen object? The question of whether infants use certain features (e.g. shape or color) more than others (e. g. luminance), can only be studied legitimately if visual salience is controlled, since the magnitude of feature values - how noticeable and...

We report a new method for calibrating differences in perceptual salience across feature dimensions, in infants. The problem of inter-dimensional salience arises in many areas of infant studies, but a general method for addressing the problem has not previously been described. Our method is based on a preferential looking paradigm, adapted to deter...

Infants' abilities to identify objects based on their perceptual features develop gradually during the first year and possibly beyond. Earlier we reported [Káldy, Z., & Leslie, A. M. (2003). Identification of objects in 9-month-old infants: Integrating ‘what’ and ‘where’ information. Developmental Science, 6, 360–373] that infants at 9 months of ag...

Purpose: Our overall objective is to determine how salience — the visual system's assessment of relative biological relevance, on which attention allocation is thought to be based — is computed for complex objects. In this initial experiment, we sought to determine whether the detectability of such objects carries the signature of object-based atte...

The question of how representational capacities develop in humans has been engaging cognitive psychologists for decades. Looking time studies have explored when infants start to show signs of perceiving and remembering the properties of specific objects at specific locations. Here we integrate these findings into the neuroscientific framework of hu...

Glover argues that separate representations underlie the planning and the control phase of actions, and he contrasts his model with Goodale and Milner's perception/action model. Is this representation indeed an independent representation within a more general action system, or is it an epiphenomenon of the interaction between the perception/action...

Glover argues that separate representations underlie the planning and the control phase of actions, and he contrasts his model with Goodale and Milner's perception/action model. Is this representation indeed an independent representation within a more general action system, or is it an epiphenomenon of the interaction between the perception/action...

Following Leslie, Xu, Tremoulet and Scholl (1998), we distinguish between individuation (the establishment of an object representation) and identification (the use of information stored in the object representation to decide which previously individuated object is being encountered). Although there has been much work on how infants individuate obje...

Long-range horizontal interactions supporting contour integration were found to be weaker in children than in adults (Kovács et al, 1999 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 96 12204-12209). In the present study, integration on a larger scale, between a target and its context was investigated. Contextual modulation of the perc...

Currently there are disputes in the infancy literature concerning when infants are first able to individuate physical objects by their features or properties. This issue has taken on new significance following claims that individuation by feature is linked to the emergence of object kind concepts toward the end of the first year. Needham (2001, thi...

This commentary discusses some problems that we have encountered with Miikkulainen's language processing model, DISCERN, described in his book, Subsymbolic Natural Language Processing: An Integrated Model of Scripts, Lexicon, Memory (1993). First, DISCERN uses grammatical analysis in an unclarified manner. It assumes certain notions like Cases with...