By 12 months, English-learning infants have an awareness of the sound patterns of word forms that constitute acceptable labels for objects in their native language. In the following experiments, we replicated and extended previous findings that Canadian English-learning infants will not link function-like words with novel objects. Across three…

The 4 experiments reported here used the preferential looking and habituation paradigms to examine whether 5-month-olds possess a perceptual template for snakes, sharks, and rodents. It was predicted that if infants possess such a template, then they would attend preferentially to schematic images of these nonhuman animal stimuli relative to…

Adults automatically infer a person's social disposition and future behavior based on the many properties they observe about how they look and sound. The goal of the current study is to explore the developmental origins of this bias. We tested whether 12-month-old infants automatically infer a character's social disposition (e.g., whether they are…

Spatial categorization has a long history in the research of infant cognition and perception. Many conclusions are drawn from the approach wherein infants are habituated to examples of a spatial category X and then display an attention recovery (i.e., dishabituation) to a contrasting category Y. However, the distinction infants make between X and…

Traditional looking-time paradigms are often used to assess infants' attention to sociocognitive phenomena, but the link between these laboratory scenarios and real-world interactions is unclear. The current study investigated hypothesized relations between traditional social-cognitive looking-time paradigms and their real-world counterparts…

Habituation of looking time has become the standard method for studying cognitive processes in infancy. This method has a long history and derives from the study of memory and habituation itself. Often, however, it is not clear how researchers make decisions about how to implement habituation as a tool to study processes such as categorization,…

In this study, we investigated relations between infants' understanding of intentional actions and measures of social responsiveness during a transitional period, 9- to 11-months. Infants (N = 52) were tested in visual habituation paradigms tapping their understanding of the relation between a person and the object of her attention. Measures of…