Serial habituation of visual fixations was investigated through a design permitting cross-sectional, within-subject longitudinal, cohort longitudinal, and time-lag analyses. Results suggested that for all ages habituation was under way to the parts of the stimulus in order of the realitive saliencies. No one methodology appeared to significantly…

Two experiments examined six-month-olds' ability to form an abstract containment category. Results indicated that, after habituation to object pairs in a containment relation, infants looked reliably longer at an example of an unfamiliar versus familiar containment relation, indicating that they could form a categorical representation of…

Two experiments explored how infants learn to form an abstract categorical representation of support (i.e., on) when habituated to few (i.e., 2) or many (i.e., 6) examples of the relation. When habituated to 2 pairs of objects in a support relation, 14-month-olds, but not 10-month-olds, formed the abstract spatial category (i.e., generalized the…

Infants were tested for recognition and discrimination of expressions. Ten-month olds familiar with a mix of happy and surprised expressions demonstrated generalized discrimination of positive affect. Only after seven months does dependence on the presence of expression-specific features for affect recognition and discrimination diminish. (BC)

Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Results suggested that at 4 months, infants attended primarily to the featural information, at 6 months primarily to the asynchrony, and at 8 months to both features independently. (Author/KB)