This paper presents two methods that we applied to our research to record infant gaze in the context of goal-oriented actions using different eye-tracking devices: head-mounted and remote eye-tracking. For each type of eye-tracking system, we discuss their advantages and disadvantages, describe the particular experimental setups we used to study…

We examined two aspects of temperamental approach in early infancy, positive reactivity and anger, and their unique and combined influences on maternal reports of child surgency and attention focusing at 4 years of age. One hundred and fourteen infants were observed for their positive reactions to novel stimuli at 4 months, and their anger…

In the present study, we examined if young infants can extract information regarding the directionality of biological motion. We report that 6-month-old infants can differentiate leftward and rightward motions from a movie depicting the sagittal view of an upright human point-light walker, walking as if on a treadmill. Inversion of the stimuli…

Behne, Carpenter, Call, and Tomasello (2005) showed that 9- to 18-month-olds, but not 6-month-olds, differentiated between people who were unwilling and unable to share toys. As the outcome of the two tasks is the same (i.e., the toy is not shared), the infants must respond to the different goals of the actor. However, visual habituation paradigms…

Learning to walk is a dynamic process requiring the fine coordination, assembly, and balancing of many body segments at once. For the young walker, coordinating all these behavioral levels may be quite daunting. In this study, we examine the whole-body strategies to which infants resort to produce their first independent steps and progress over…

Mothers' use of specific types of object motion in synchrony with object naming was examined, along with infants' joint attention to the mother and object, as a predictor of word learning. During a semistructured 3-min play episode, mothers (N = 24) taught the names of 2 toy objects to their preverbal 6- to 8-month-old infants. The episodes were…

Mothers modify their actions when demonstrating objects to infants versus adults. Such modifications have been called infant-directed action (IDA) or "motionese" (Brand, Baldwin, & Ashburn, 2002). We investigated the IDA features of interactiveness and simplification by quantifying eye gaze, object exchanges, and action units enacted…

The contribution of motion and feature invariant information in infants' discrimination of maternal versus female stranger faces was assessed. Using an infant controlled habituation--dishabituation procedure, 4- and 8-month-old infants (N = 62) were tested for their ability to discriminate between their mother and a female stranger in 4 different…

This study examined infants' use of object knowledge for scaling the manipulative force of object-directed actions. Infants 9, 12, and 15 months of age were outfitted with motion-analysis sensors on their arms and then presented with stimulus objects to examine individually over a series of familiarization trials. Two stimulus objects were used in…

This study examined 6-month-old infants' abilities to use the visual information provided by simulated self-movement through the world, and movement of an object through the world, for spatial orientation. Infants were habituated to a visual display in which they saw a toy hidden, followed by either rotation of the point of observation through the…

Six experiments investigated 7-month-old infants' capacity to learn about the self-propelled motion of an object. After observing 1 wind-up toy animal move on its own and a second wind-up toy animal move passively by an experimenter's hand, infants looked reliably longer at the former object during a subsequent stationary test, providing evidence…