When concepts erode with neuropathology, patients lose knowledge of the visual details that differentiate related items,such as the hump of a camel or the color of a pumpkin. Consequently they fail to differentiate real vs chimeric itemsdiffering in these properties. We assessed whether the same pattern is observed over conceptual development. Childrenviewed a real and chimeric item differing in a single property and decided which was real and which silly. For some items,the correct choice was more prototypic (e.g. a donkey vs a donkey with a hump); for others, less (e.g. a camel vs a camelwith no hump). Stimuli differed in their shape/parts or in color. Like patients with semantic impairments, children moreoften failed to recognize items with atypical parts, even when these were successfully named. The reverse pattern wasobserved for the color task. These results importantly constrain theories of conceptual development.

Recent behavioral findings in children’s selection of a “real” versus “silly” animal demonstrated a developmentalchange wherein younger children select chimeric animals with regular forms (e.g., a seal with four legs, a camel with no hump)as real. To reduce verbal demands while maintaining the same stimuli, we developed a touch screen change-detection task inwhich children (4 – 7-years-old) were instructed to locate a single changing feature (e.g., a rhinoceros with and without a horn)as fast as possible. Children were faster to find changes when the feature appeared on animals with more prototypic animalforms (e.g., a donkey with and without a hump) when compared to animals with atypical forms (e.g., a camel with and withouta hump). Alongside exploration via computational models, these findings suggest that children’s real-world object recognitionis supported by the interplay of semantic knowledge, informed by covariation among visual features, and visual recognition.

Early math instruction often prioritizes rapid retrieval of mathematical facts, (e.g. 4 + 6 = ; 10), an approach thatpromotes quick recall of sums but with limited transfer to unstudied problems. We consider how this pattern changeswhen the learning scenario highlights the quantities that underlie symbols. Adult participants learned a novel base 8addition task using alphabetic symbols to indicate quantities (e.g. AG + AF = ). They practiced with symbols onlyor with symbols grounded in quantitative representations. When tested in the same format as participants were trained,studied problems were learned equally well but symbol-only learners transferred only to identical-elements problems (e.g.AG + AF transferred to AF + AG). Grounded learners showed better transfer to problems involving novel quantities.The results suggest, in contradiction to some other recent findings, that arithmetic transfer is boosted when the learningscenario highlights quantitative meaning denoted by number symbols.

Recent work using neural networks and crowd-sourced perceptual judgements has shown that human figure drawings contain latent structure that can predict many characteristics of the artist including parent-reported motor function and perceived gender. We extend these approaches to two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional cubes, assessing whether latent structure in these cube drawings likewise predicts demographic characteristics and motor function measured via a paper-folding task. Drawings produced with marker and paper showed a large predictive relationship with paper-folding (accounting for 59% of the offset variance, 62% of the angle variance, ps < .01). We also observed a complex interaction with gender: better cube-drawings predicted better paper-folding for male-identifying participants, but this relationship was reversed for female-identifying participants, who demonstrated better paper folding abilities overall. The results suggest that cube drawings contain richer structure than previously recognized and can provide a useful nonverbal metric for characterizing aspects of cognitive and motor abilities.