This study quantified the spatial exploration of 13 infants born very and extremely preterm (PT) at 4 months corrected age as they learned that moving their feet vertically to cross a virtual threshold activated an infant kick-activated mobile and compared results to 15 infants born full-term (FT) from a previously published study. Spatial…

Dance is a universal human behavior and a crucial component of human musicality. When and how does the motivation and tendency to move to music develop? How does this behavior change as a process of maturation and learning? We characterize infants' earliest dance behavior, leveraging parents' extensive at-home observations of their children.…

Infancy is a period of significant change for both the brain and behavior. During the first two years of life, the brain experiences an explosion of synaptic connections and myelination, alongside rapid development in motor, linguistic, and social behavioral abilities. Understanding the relationship between brain development and behavioral…

Exploration is considered essential to infant learning, but few studies have quantified infants' task exploration. The purpose of this study was to quantify how infants explored task space with their feet while learning to activate a kick-activated mobile. Data were analyzed from fifteen 4-month-old infants who participated in a 10-min mobile task…

Background: Spontaneous upper extremity movements in infancy provide insight on neuromotor development. Spatiotemporal kinematics have been used to evaluate typical development of reaching, a foundational motor skill in infancy. This study evaluates the relationship between spontaneous upper extremity movements, not elicited by a toy, and motor…

The behavior of newborns is ambiguous. Cultural models--representations shared by members of a community--provide new parents and others with a cognitive and motivational structure to understand them. This study asks members of several cultural groups (total n = 100) to judge the "similarity" of behavioral items in the Neonatal…

Infants learn nouns during object-naming events--moments when caregivers name the object of infants' play (e.g., ball as infant holds a ball). Do caregivers also label the actions of infants' play (e.g., roll as infant rolls a ball)? We investigated connections between mothers' verb inputs and infants' actions. We video-recorded 32 infant-mother…

This study examines the construct validity of the First-Year Inventory 2.0 with respect to other established instruments in a sample of high-risk infant siblings of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The First-Year Inventory 2.0 is a parent-report screening instrument designed to identify 12-month-old infants at risk for an eventual diagnosis…

Introduction: Although recent research has focused on the effects of maternal eating disorders (EDs) on children, little is known about the effect of maternal EDs on neurobiological outcomes in newborns and infants. This study is the first to investigate neurobehavioural regulation and cognitive development in newborns and infants of mothers with…

This study examined whether a novel parent-report questionnaire, the Autism Parent Screen for Infants, could differentiate infants subsequently diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder from a high-risk cohort (siblings of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (n = 66)) from high-risk and low-risk comparison infants (no family history of…