Gudrun Schwarzer
Biographic Data
| ID | 117193 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gudrun Schwarzer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gudrun |
| FAMILY NAME | Schwarzer |
| SIGNATURE | SCHWARZER G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4871-3881 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Distributional learning beyond perceptual reorganization: Enhanced discrimination in children and adults after bimodal training
Infants and adults use statistical information from the speech input to form phonetic categories. This ability has been shown by numerous experiments presenting the participants with either a bimodal or a unimodal distribution of sounds from an acoustic continuum. However, this ability seems to decrease across the first year of life in parallel with infants’ establishment of the native language phonetic categories. So far, it is unclear whether t…
Neural correlates of lexical-tone and vowel-quality processing in 6- and 9-month-old German-learning infants and adults
We examined the neurophysiological underpinnings of lexical-tone and vowel-quality perception in learners of a non-tonal language. We tested 25 6- and 25 9-month-old German-learning infants, as well as 24 German adults and expected developmental differences for the two linguistic properties, as they are both carried by vowels, but have a different status in German. In adults, both lexical-tone and vowel-quality contrasts elicited mismatch negativ…
Differences in the interplay of face and speech processing in 5-year-olds and adults
The current study examined to what extent face and speech processing interact with each other and whether they enhance or impair the processing of the other in 5-year-olds ( n = 51) and adults ( n = 34). Using a computer-based speeded sorting task allowed to directly test the influence of auditory speech on face processing and the influence of face identity on auditory speech processing within one experiment. Participants were asked to either sor…
Older infants' social learning behavior under uncertainty is modulated by the interaction of face and speech processing
The origin of face or language influences infants' perceptual processing and social learning behavior. However, it remains unclear how infants' social learning behavior is affected when both information are provided simultaneously. Hence, the current study investigated whether and how infants' social learning in terms of gaze following is influenced by face race and language origin of an interaction partner in an uncertain situation. Our sample c…
Asymmetries in Infants’ Vowel Perception: Changes in Vowel Discrimination in German Learning 6- and 9-Month-Old Infants
Infants’ speech perception is characterized by substantial changes during the first year of life that attune the processing mechanisms to the specific properties of the ambient language. This paper focuses on these developmental changes in vowel perception. More specifically, the emergence and potential cause of perceptual asymmetries in vowel perception are investigated by an experimental study on German 6- and 9-month-olds’ discrimination of a …
Music training and executive functions in adults and children: What role do hot executive functions play
Executive functions (EFs) are a set of cognitive processes that enable us to control attention and regulate behaviour. Since music training involves these processes to a large extent, positive associations can be assumed. Previous research confirmed this assumption with some studies indicating even causal relationships. However, almost all the research focused on purely analytical processes, so-called cold EFs. By contrast, hot EFs involve proces…
Can language modulate perceptual narrowing for faces? Other-race face recognition in infants is modulated by language experience
Between 6 and 9 months, while infant’s ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group is maintained, discrimination of faces within other-race groups declines to a point where 9-month-old infants fail to discriminate other-race faces. Such face perception narrowing can be overcome in various ways at 9 or 12 months of age, such as presenting faces with emotional expressions. Can language itself modulate face narrowing? Many adult stud…
The influence of music training on motoric inhibition in German preschool children
The aim of our experiment was to investigate the effect of a music training program on motoric inhibition in German preschoolers. Studies have shown that in children, music lessons and inhibition are associated, and that music training might have the potential to improve inhibition. Improving executive functions is particularly useful in young children as they are highly relevant for success in school. We conducted an intervention study to invest…
Parental perceived stress and its consequences on early social-emotional child development during Covid-19 pandemic
In 2020, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and the resulting highly infectious disease COVID-19 led to restrictions based on the principal of social distancing to curb the spread of the virus among the population and to prevent an overload of health system capacities. These restrictions changed the daily lives of young children and parents dramatically. In a German questionnaire study, we aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic o…
Effects of visual and visual-haptic perception of material rigidity on reaching and grasping in the course of development
The development of material property perception for grasping objects is not well explored during early childhood. Therefore, we investigated infants', 3-year-old children's, and adults' unimanual grasping behavior and reaching kinematics for objects of different rigidity using a 3D motion capture system. In Experiment 1, 11-month-old infants and for purposes of comparison adults, and in Experiment 2, 3-year old children were encouraged to lift re…
Active music making facilitates prosocial behaviour in 18-month-old children
Whenever we celebrate in a group, music and dance are usually part of it. Music making is a highly social activity and even listening to recorded music in a group still gives us a sense of feeling as a unit. Recently, studies have shown that joint music making promotes prosocial feelings and behaviour in children and preschoolers. Active music making led to more prosocial behaviour than a similar non-musical activity. Until now, however, the impa…
Language familiarity influences own‐race face recognition in 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants
During their first year, infants attune to the faces and language(s) that are frequent in their environment. The present study investigates the impact of language familiarity on how French‐learning 9‐ and 12‐month‐olds recognize own‐race faces. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with the talking face of a Caucasian bilingual German‐French speaker reciting a nursery rhyme in French (native condition) or in German (non‐native condition). In…
Identification of Emotional Facial Expressions in a Lab and Over the Internet
Collecting data over the internet is an approach that allows researchers to vastly expand the possible sample sizes of their studies, and enables the study of populations that may otherwise be difficult to access. However, to ensure that data collected over the internet is of the same level of quality as data collected in a lab, the comparability of internet-collected data with lab-collected data must first be assessed for individual areas of res…
The influence of an extended music curriculum at school on academic self-concept in 9- to 11-year-old children
Cognitive transfer effects of music lessons on several cognitive abilities such as IQ (Schellenberg, 2004) or language skills (Moreno et al., 2009) have been reported. Beyond that, also conative transfer effects (i.e., motivational aspects like perseverance) of music lessons have been revealed. One such conative transfer has been found for academic self-concept (Degé, Wehrum, Stark, & Schwarzer, 2014). Self-concept describes the evaluations a per…
Associations between two measures of music aptitude: Are the Imma and the Amma significantly correlated in a sample of 9- to 13-year-old children
The aim of this study was to correlate musical aptitude scores derived from two tests based on the same structural model for musical aptitude in a sample of 9- to 13-year-old children. We controlled for the influences of socioeconomic status (SES; measured by parents’ education), the amount of music lessons, and general cognitive abilities (i.e., IQ). The sample comprised 89 (46 girls) 9- to 13-year-old children. We applied two different tests by…
How Manual Object Exploration is Associated with 7‐ to 8‐Month‐Old Infants’ Visual Prediction Abilities in Spatial Object Processing
The present experiment examined whether infants’ visual prediction performance of the appearance of objects moving in space is related to their manual object exploration ability. Fifty‐five 7‐ to 8‐month‐old infants were tested. A visual object prediction paradigm was developed during which a three‐dimensional object was presented in a live eye‐tracking setting. During familiarization, the object rotated back and forth along the vertical axis. Wh…
Face Perception Development During Early Childhood
Music lessons and academic self-concept in 12- to 14-year-old children
Music lessons increase children’s performance on cognitive ability tests and promote academic achievement. The association between academic achievement and music lessons remains reliable even when IQ is held constant, which indicates that the association is more than a cognitive transfer effect. The question therefore arises of whether music lessons are associated with other variables that are related to academic achievement. The present study in…
Differential Development of Motor Abilities in Western Middle-Class and Cameroonian Nso Infants
The present longitudinal study repeatedly tested motor development in 345 infants at ages 3, 6, and 9 months in two eco-cultural contexts (German middle-class and Cameroonian Nso). To analyze differential motor developments and its co-determinants (parental education and growth in weight), person-centered analyses (hierarchical cluster analyses) were applied. Results indicate that cluster analyses of fine motor development scores led to two cultu…
Gross and Fine Motor Differences Between Cameroonian and German Children Aged 3 to 40 Months: Results of a Cross-Cultural Longitudinal Study
Based on longitudinal data, this study compared the gross and fine motor development of Cameroonian Nso children and German middle-class children with assessments at 3, 6, 9, and 40 months. A total of 345 infants from Cameroon ( n = 73) and Germany ( n = 272) were recruited for this study. Complete longitudinal gross and fine motor assessments based on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development III were available for subsamples of the originally rec…
African Versus Caucasian Faces in a Visual Expectation Paradigm: A Longitudinal Study With German and Cameroonian Infants
This article focuses on sequence learning on the Visual Expectation Paradigm (VExP) using human faces as stimulus material. For a sample of 133 Caucasian German infants assessed longitudinally at 3 and 6 months of age, a previous study has shown that the response latency of 6-month-old infants was shorter when the infants solved the task with Caucasian own-race faces in contrast to African other-race faces. The advantage for own-race faces occurs…
Mother-Infant Interactions at Home and in a Laboratory Setting: A Comparative Analysis in Two Cultural Contexts
This study addresses the question how the setting of assessment influences maternal playing behavior with their 3-month-old infants across cultures. Mother-infant interactions of 338 dyads from two cultural communities (German middle-class and rural Cameroonian Nso) were videotaped either in their home or in a laboratory setting. Results indicate that both settings of assessment are appropriate to observe cultural differences in maternal interact…
Imitative Learning of Nso and German Infants at 6 and 9 Months of Age: Evidence for a Cross-Cultural Learning Tool
The present study focused on the assessment of imitation performance in a large sample of 6- and 9-month-old infants from two different cultural contexts: German middle-class infants from urban areas and Nso infants from a rural area in northwestern Cameroon were tested by using age-adapted deferred imitation tasks that were varied regarding their cultural familiarity (two types of instruments each being highly familiar for one of the two cultura…
Crawling is Associated with Mental Rotation Ability by 9‐Month‐Old Infants
The present experiment examined whether 9‐month‐old infants’ mental rotation ability was related to their crawling ability. Forty‐eight 9‐month‐old infants were tested; half of them crawled for 7.1 weeks on average. Infants were habituated to a video of a simplified Shepard–Metzler object rotating back and forth through a 240° angle around the longitudinal axis of the object. Infants were tested with videos of the same object rotating through the…
The Other‐Race Effect in a Longitudinal Sample of 3‐, 6‐ and 9‐Month‐Old Infants: Evidence of a Training Effect
We investigated the development of the other‐race effect “ ORE ” in a longitudinal sample of 3‐, 6‐, and 9‐month‐old C aucasian infants. Previous research using cross‐sectional samples has shown an unstable ORE at 3 months, an increase at 6 months and full development at 9 months. In Experiment 1, we tested whether 9‐month‐olds showed the ORE with C aucasian and A frican faces. As expected, the 9‐month‐olds discriminated faces within their own et…
Parental perceived stress and its consequences on early social-emotional child development during Covid-19 pandemic
In 2020, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and the resulting highly infectious disease COVID-19 led to restrictions based on the principal of social distancing to curb the spread of the virus among the population and to prevent an overload of health system capacities. These restrictions changed the daily lives of young children and parents dramatically. In a German questionnaire study, we aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic o…
Imitative Learning of Nso and German Infants at 6 and 9 Months of Age: Evidence for a Cross-Cultural Learning Tool
The present study focused on the assessment of imitation performance in a large sample of 6- and 9-month-old infants from two different cultural contexts: German middle-class infants from urban areas and Nso infants from a rural area in northwestern Cameroon were tested by using age-adapted deferred imitation tasks that were varied regarding their cultural familiarity (two types of instruments each being highly familiar for one of the two cultura…
The Peaceful Settlement of Interstate Conflict: Saar, Austria, and Berlin
An integrative process model of conflict settlement is developed and compared in the cases of three conflicts. The basic idea is that conflict settlement should be understood as a process unfolding in two steps, each of which needs to be explained. The first step is `getting to the table' (negotiation), the second step is `getting to yes' (agreement). Different conditions must be satisfied for the opponents to take these two essential steps of co…
Gross and Fine Motor Differences Between Cameroonian and German Children Aged 3 to 40 Months: Results of a Cross-Cultural Longitudinal Study
Based on longitudinal data, this study compared the gross and fine motor development of Cameroonian Nso children and German middle-class children with assessments at 3, 6, 9, and 40 months. A total of 345 infants from Cameroon ( n = 73) and Germany ( n = 272) were recruited for this study. Complete longitudinal gross and fine motor assessments based on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development III were available for subsamples of the originally rec…
The Peaceful Settlement of Interstate Conflict: Saar, Austria, and Berlin
An integrative process model of conflict settlement is developed and compared in the cases of three conflicts. The basic idea is that conflict settlement should be understood as a process unfolding in two steps, each of which needs to be explained. The first step is `getting to the table' (negotiation), the second step is `getting to yes' (agreement). Different conditions must be satisfied for the opponents to take these two essential steps of co…
The Relationship Between Processing Facial Identity and Emotional Expression in 8‐Month‐Old Infants
In Experiment 1, it was investigated whether infants process facial identity and emotional expression independently or in conjunction with one another. Eight‐month‐old infants were habituated to two upright or two inverted faces varying in facial identity and emotional expression. Infants were tested with a habituation face, a switch face, and a novel face. In the switch faces, a new combination of identity and emotional expression was presented.…
Crawling is Associated with Mental Rotation Ability by 9‐Month‐Old Infants
The present experiment examined whether 9‐month‐old infants’ mental rotation ability was related to their crawling ability. Forty‐eight 9‐month‐old infants were tested; half of them crawled for 7.1 weeks on average. Infants were habituated to a video of a simplified Shepard–Metzler object rotating back and forth through a 240° angle around the longitudinal axis of the object. Infants were tested with videos of the same object rotating through the…
The Other‐Race Effect in a Longitudinal Sample of 3‐, 6‐ and 9‐Month‐Old Infants: Evidence of a Training Effect
We investigated the development of the other‐race effect “ ORE ” in a longitudinal sample of 3‐, 6‐, and 9‐month‐old C aucasian infants. Previous research using cross‐sectional samples has shown an unstable ORE at 3 months, an increase at 6 months and full development at 9 months. In Experiment 1, we tested whether 9‐month‐olds showed the ORE with C aucasian and A frican faces. As expected, the 9‐month‐olds discriminated faces within their own et…
Music lessons and academic self-concept in 12- to 14-year-old children
Music lessons increase children’s performance on cognitive ability tests and promote academic achievement. The association between academic achievement and music lessons remains reliable even when IQ is held constant, which indicates that the association is more than a cognitive transfer effect. The question therefore arises of whether music lessons are associated with other variables that are related to academic achievement. The present study in…
Differential Development of Motor Abilities in Western Middle-Class and Cameroonian Nso Infants
The present longitudinal study repeatedly tested motor development in 345 infants at ages 3, 6, and 9 months in two eco-cultural contexts (German middle-class and Cameroonian Nso). To analyze differential motor developments and its co-determinants (parental education and growth in weight), person-centered analyses (hierarchical cluster analyses) were applied. Results indicate that cluster analyses of fine motor development scores led to two cultu…
Gross and Fine Motor Differences Between Cameroonian and German Children Aged 3 to 40 Months: Results of a Cross-Cultural Longitudinal Study
Based on longitudinal data, this study compared the gross and fine motor development of Cameroonian Nso children and German middle-class children with assessments at 3, 6, 9, and 40 months. A total of 345 infants from Cameroon ( n = 73) and Germany ( n = 272) were recruited for this study. Complete longitudinal gross and fine motor assessments based on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development III were available for subsamples of the originally rec…
African Versus Caucasian Faces in a Visual Expectation Paradigm: A Longitudinal Study With German and Cameroonian Infants
This article focuses on sequence learning on the Visual Expectation Paradigm (VExP) using human faces as stimulus material. For a sample of 133 Caucasian German infants assessed longitudinally at 3 and 6 months of age, a previous study has shown that the response latency of 6-month-old infants was shorter when the infants solved the task with Caucasian own-race faces in contrast to African other-race faces. The advantage for own-race faces occurs…
Mother-Infant Interactions at Home and in a Laboratory Setting: A Comparative Analysis in Two Cultural Contexts
This study addresses the question how the setting of assessment influences maternal playing behavior with their 3-month-old infants across cultures. Mother-infant interactions of 338 dyads from two cultural communities (German middle-class and rural Cameroonian Nso) were videotaped either in their home or in a laboratory setting. Results indicate that both settings of assessment are appropriate to observe cultural differences in maternal interact…
Imitative Learning of Nso and German Infants at 6 and 9 Months of Age: Evidence for a Cross-Cultural Learning Tool
The present study focused on the assessment of imitation performance in a large sample of 6- and 9-month-old infants from two different cultural contexts: German middle-class infants from urban areas and Nso infants from a rural area in northwestern Cameroon were tested by using age-adapted deferred imitation tasks that were varied regarding their cultural familiarity (two types of instruments each being highly familiar for one of the two cultura…
Face Perception Development During Early Childhood
Associations between two measures of music aptitude: Are the Imma and the Amma significantly correlated in a sample of 9- to 13-year-old children
The aim of this study was to correlate musical aptitude scores derived from two tests based on the same structural model for musical aptitude in a sample of 9- to 13-year-old children. We controlled for the influences of socioeconomic status (SES; measured by parents’ education), the amount of music lessons, and general cognitive abilities (i.e., IQ). The sample comprised 89 (46 girls) 9- to 13-year-old children. We applied two different tests by…
How Manual Object Exploration is Associated with 7‐ to 8‐Month‐Old Infants’ Visual Prediction Abilities in Spatial Object Processing
The present experiment examined whether infants’ visual prediction performance of the appearance of objects moving in space is related to their manual object exploration ability. Fifty‐five 7‐ to 8‐month‐old infants were tested. A visual object prediction paradigm was developed during which a three‐dimensional object was presented in a live eye‐tracking setting. During familiarization, the object rotated back and forth along the vertical axis. Wh…
The influence of an extended music curriculum at school on academic self-concept in 9- to 11-year-old children
Cognitive transfer effects of music lessons on several cognitive abilities such as IQ (Schellenberg, 2004) or language skills (Moreno et al., 2009) have been reported. Beyond that, also conative transfer effects (i.e., motivational aspects like perseverance) of music lessons have been revealed. One such conative transfer has been found for academic self-concept (Degé, Wehrum, Stark, & Schwarzer, 2014). Self-concept describes the evaluations a per…
Identification of Emotional Facial Expressions in a Lab and Over the Internet
Collecting data over the internet is an approach that allows researchers to vastly expand the possible sample sizes of their studies, and enables the study of populations that may otherwise be difficult to access. However, to ensure that data collected over the internet is of the same level of quality as data collected in a lab, the comparability of internet-collected data with lab-collected data must first be assessed for individual areas of res…
Effects of visual and visual-haptic perception of material rigidity on reaching and grasping in the course of development
The development of material property perception for grasping objects is not well explored during early childhood. Therefore, we investigated infants', 3-year-old children's, and adults' unimanual grasping behavior and reaching kinematics for objects of different rigidity using a 3D motion capture system. In Experiment 1, 11-month-old infants and for purposes of comparison adults, and in Experiment 2, 3-year old children were encouraged to lift re…
Active music making facilitates prosocial behaviour in 18-month-old children
Whenever we celebrate in a group, music and dance are usually part of it. Music making is a highly social activity and even listening to recorded music in a group still gives us a sense of feeling as a unit. Recently, studies have shown that joint music making promotes prosocial feelings and behaviour in children and preschoolers. Active music making led to more prosocial behaviour than a similar non-musical activity. Until now, however, the impa…
Language familiarity influences own‐race face recognition in 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants
During their first year, infants attune to the faces and language(s) that are frequent in their environment. The present study investigates the impact of language familiarity on how French‐learning 9‐ and 12‐month‐olds recognize own‐race faces. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with the talking face of a Caucasian bilingual German‐French speaker reciting a nursery rhyme in French (native condition) or in German (non‐native condition). In…
Music training and executive functions in adults and children: What role do hot executive functions play
Executive functions (EFs) are a set of cognitive processes that enable us to control attention and regulate behaviour. Since music training involves these processes to a large extent, positive associations can be assumed. Previous research confirmed this assumption with some studies indicating even causal relationships. However, almost all the research focused on purely analytical processes, so-called cold EFs. By contrast, hot EFs involve proces…
Can language modulate perceptual narrowing for faces? Other-race face recognition in infants is modulated by language experience
Between 6 and 9 months, while infant’s ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group is maintained, discrimination of faces within other-race groups declines to a point where 9-month-old infants fail to discriminate other-race faces. Such face perception narrowing can be overcome in various ways at 9 or 12 months of age, such as presenting faces with emotional expressions. Can language itself modulate face narrowing? Many adult stud…
The influence of music training on motoric inhibition in German preschool children
The aim of our experiment was to investigate the effect of a music training program on motoric inhibition in German preschoolers. Studies have shown that in children, music lessons and inhibition are associated, and that music training might have the potential to improve inhibition. Improving executive functions is particularly useful in young children as they are highly relevant for success in school. We conducted an intervention study to invest…
Parental perceived stress and its consequences on early social-emotional child development during Covid-19 pandemic
In 2020, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and the resulting highly infectious disease COVID-19 led to restrictions based on the principal of social distancing to curb the spread of the virus among the population and to prevent an overload of health system capacities. These restrictions changed the daily lives of young children and parents dramatically. In a German questionnaire study, we aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic o…
Differences in the interplay of face and speech processing in 5-year-olds and adults
The current study examined to what extent face and speech processing interact with each other and whether they enhance or impair the processing of the other in 5-year-olds ( n = 51) and adults ( n = 34). Using a computer-based speeded sorting task allowed to directly test the influence of auditory speech on face processing and the influence of face identity on auditory speech processing within one experiment. Participants were asked to either sor…
Older infants' social learning behavior under uncertainty is modulated by the interaction of face and speech processing
The origin of face or language influences infants' perceptual processing and social learning behavior. However, it remains unclear how infants' social learning behavior is affected when both information are provided simultaneously. Hence, the current study investigated whether and how infants' social learning in terms of gaze following is influenced by face race and language origin of an interaction partner in an uncertain situation. Our sample c…
Asymmetries in Infants’ Vowel Perception: Changes in Vowel Discrimination in German Learning 6- and 9-Month-Old Infants
Infants’ speech perception is characterized by substantial changes during the first year of life that attune the processing mechanisms to the specific properties of the ambient language. This paper focuses on these developmental changes in vowel perception. More specifically, the emergence and potential cause of perceptual asymmetries in vowel perception are investigated by an experimental study on German 6- and 9-month-olds’ discrimination of a …
Psychology (25 works) · Developmental psychology (19 works) · Cognitive psychology (12 works) · German (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Face Recognition and Perception (9 works) · Perception (9 works) · Medicine (8 works) · Linguistics (7 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (6 works)