This study examined differences in visual attention as a function of label learning from 6 to 9 months of age. Before and after 3 months of parent-directed storybook training with computer-generated novel objects, event-related potentials and visual fixations were recorded while infants viewed trained and untrained images (n = 23). Relative to a…

With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6- and 8-month-olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue-reward…

Two experiments demonstrate that 5-month-olds are sensitive to local redundancy in visual-temporal sequences. In Experiment 1, 20 infants saw 2 separate sequences of looming colored shapes that possessed the same elements but contrasting transitional probabilities. One sequence was random whereas the other was based on bigrams. Without any prior…

The strategies children employ to selectively attend to different parts of the face may reflect important developmental changes in facial emotion recognition. Using the Moving Window Technique (MWT), children aged 5-12 years and adults ("N" = 129) explored faces with a mouse-controlled window in an emotion recognition task. An…

This article presents an eye-tracking study using a novel combination of visual saliency maps and "area-of-interest" analyses to explore online feature extraction during category learning in infants. Category learning in 12-month-olds (N = 22) involved a transition from looking at high-saliency image regions to looking at more…

Six-month-olds reliably discriminate different monkey and human faces whereas 9-month-olds only discriminate different human faces. It is often falsely assumed that perceptual narrowing reflects a permanent change in perceptual abilities. In 3 experiments, ninety-six 12-month-olds' discrimination of unfamiliar monkey faces was examined. Following…

Over their 1st year of life, infants' "universal" perception of the sounds of language narrows to encompass only those contrasts made in their native language (J. F. Werker & R. C. Tees, 1984). This research tested 40 infants in an eyetracking paradigm and showed that this pattern also holds for infants exposed to seen language--American Sign…

To test the hypothesis that biological motion perception is developmentally integrated with important social cognitive abilities, 12-month-olds (N = 36) were shown a display of a human point-light figure turning to observe a target. Infants spontaneously and reliably followed the figure's "gaze" despite the absence of familiar and socially…

The capacity of newborn infants for smooth-pursuit eye movements in single-target tracking and in optokinetic nystagmus to a moving striped field was examined utilizing DC electrooculography. (JMB)

The effects of posture on the visual behavior of 15 3-day-old healthy, black, newborn infants were assessed. Findings suggest that the vestibular, proprioceptive, and contact stimulation provided by the on-shoulder position affects the newborn's ability to follow and process visual stimuli. (Author/CS)

Behavioral studies of early visual development are interpreted within a framework provided by data from the neurosciences. Conclusions concerning the visual responses elicited during the first month of life and the more sophisticated reactions appearing during the second and third months of infancy are presented. (Author/SDH)

Compares estimates of monocular visual resolution of children 6- to 36-months of age with three psychophysical procedures: the Probabilistic Estimation by Sequential Testing (PEST), a modification of the PEST procedure, and the method-of-constant stimuli. (HOD)

Infants of 12 months were tactually familiarized with either a hard or an elastic substance. Subjects subsequently were shown films of objects moving in patterns characteristic of either hard or elastic objects, and their eye movements were detected. Results suggested that quite young infants detect intermodel invariants specifying some substances…

Six-month-old African-American infants' expectation of a visual stimulus was related to developmental measures. Reaction time was related to eye fixation in tests that measured visual recognition memory (VRM) and presented objects of different shapes to the infant. Reaction time and infants' stimulus expectation predicted VRM novelty preference.…