This study investigated transfer effects of gaze-interactive attention training to more complex social and cognitive skills in infancy. Seventy 9-month-olds were assigned to a training group (n = 35) or an active control group (n = 35). Before, after, and at 6-week follow-up both groups completed an assessment battery assessing transfer to…

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…

Infants' language exposure largely involves face-to-face interactions providing acoustic and visual speech cues but also social cues that might foster language learning. Yet, both audiovisual speech information and social information have so far received little attention in research on infants' early language development. Using a preferential…

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…

Past research has shown that top-heaviness is a perceptual property that plays a crucial role in triggering newborns' preference toward faces. The present study examined the contribution of a second configural property, "congruency," to newborns' face preference. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that when embedded in nonfacelike stimuli,…

This investigation examined whether infants display "boundary extension"--a tendency to remember more of a visual scene than was presented. Three- to 7-month-olds were familiarized with a photograph of a visual scene, and tested with wide-angle versus close-up views of the scene. Infants preferred the close-up, indicating that they perceived the…

A series of five experiments explore the 7-month-old infant's ability to discriminate among photos of faces. The infant's tendency to choose visual targets for inspection provides evidence of discrimination and recognition. (Author/JH)

Reports three experiments in infant visual perception which studied the processes underlying infants' shifts of fixation from one object to another. (JMB)

Tests the hypothesis that age-related shifts in infants' visual preferences for stimuli (varying in complexity as defined by number of light-dark intersections) are due to changing attention value both within and between the inversely varying dimensions of size and number. (Author/ED)

The relationship between neonatal visual information-processing and the burst-pause pattern of nonnutritive sucking was explored. (JMB)

An investigation of 4-month-old children's attention responses to pattern dimensions and orientations by comparing the duration of an infant's fixation to changes in the orientation and structural arrangement of a previously exposed pattern. (ED)