In this research, the emotion recognition abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder and typically developing children were compared. When facial expressions and situational cues of emotion were congruent, accuracy in recognizing emotions was good for both children with autism spectrum disorder and typically developing children. When…

Developmental approaches to autism treatment aim to establish strong interpersonal relationships through joint play. These approaches have emerging empirical support; however, there is a need for further research documenting the procedures and demonstrating their effectiveness. This pilot study evaluated changes in parent behavior and child autism…

Do young infants understand that pointing gestures allow the pointer to change the information state of a recipient? We used a third-party experimental scenario to examine whether 9- and 11-month-olds understand that a pointer's pointing gesture can inform a recipient about a target object. When the pointer pointed to a target, infants…

A perturbation paradigm was employed to assess 3- and 6-month-old infants' and their mothers' sensitivity to a 3-s temporal delay implemented in an ongoing televised interaction. At both ages, the temporal delay affected infant but not maternal behavior and only when implementing the temporal delay in maternal (Experiment 1, N = 64) but not infant…

Audiovisual speech consists of overlapping and invariant patterns of dynamic acoustic and optic articulatory information. Research has shown that infants can perceive a variety of basic auditory-visual (A-V) relations but no studies have investigated whether and when infants begin to perceive higher order A-V relations inherent in speech. Here, we…

Previous studies have shown that infants, including newborns, can match previously unseen and unheard human faces and vocalizations. More recently, it has been reported that infants as young as 4 months of age also can match the faces and vocalizations of other species raising the possibility that such broad multisensory perceptual tuning is…

We argue that 4 fundamental gestalt phenomena in perception apply to the control of motor action. First, a motor gestalt, like a perceptual gestalt, is holistic in the sense that it is processed as a single unit. This notion is consistent with reaction time results indicating that all gestures for a brief unit of action must be programmed prior to…

Speakers choose a particular expression based on many factors, including availability of the referent in the perceptual context. We examined whether, when expressing referents, monolingual English- and Turkish-speaking children: (1) are sensitive to perceptual context, (2) express this sensitivity in language-specific ways, and (3) use co-speech…

We explored the perceptual structure of facial expressions of six basic emotions, varying systematically in intensity, in adults and children aged 7 and 14 years. Multidimensional scaling suggested that three- or four-dimensional structures were optimal for all groups. Two groups of adults demonstrated nearly identical structure, which had…

Children with congenital blindness are delayed in understanding other people's minds. The present study examined whether this delay was related to a more primitive form of inter-subjectivity by which infants draw correspondence between parental mirroring of the infant's display and proprioceptive sensations. Twenty children with congenital…