Research with Western samples has uncovered the rapid development of infants' visual attention. This study evaluated spatial attention in 6- to 9-month-old infants living in rural Malawi (N = 511; n[subscript Boys] = 255, n[subscript Yao] = 427) or suburban California, United States (N = 57, n[subscript Boys] = 29, n[subscript White] = 37) in…

Is early reasoning about an agent's knowledge best characterized by a mentalistic stance, a teleological stance, or both? In this research, 5-month-old infants (N = 64, 50% female, 83% White) saw a novel eyeless agent consistently approach object-A as opposed to object-B. Although infants could always see both objects, a screen separated object-B…

This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

Efficient attention control is fundamental for infant cognitive development, but its early precursors are not well understood. This study investigated whether dyadic visual attention during parent-infant interactions at 5 months of age predicts the ability to control attention at 11 months of age (N = 55). Total duration of mutual gaze (MG) was…

Visual information influences speech perception in both infants and adults. It is still unknown whether lexical representations are multisensory. To address this question, we exposed 18-month-old infants (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) to new word-object pairings: Participants either heard the acoustic form of the words or saw the talking face in…

To understand spoken words, listeners must appropriately interpret co-occurring talker characteristics and speech sound content. This ability was tested in 6- to 14-months-olds by measuring their looking to named food and body part images. In the "new talker" condition (n = 90), pictures were named by an unfamiliar voice; in the…

Infants must develop both flexibility and constraint in their interpretation of acceptable word forms. The current experiments examined the development of infants' lexical interpretation of non-native variations in pitch contour. Fourteen-, 17-, and 19-month-olds (Experiments 1 and 2, N = 72) heard labels for two novel objects; labels…

Comparisons of cognitive processing in monolinguals and bilinguals have revealed a bilingual advantage in inhibitory control. Recent studies have demonstrated advantages associated with exposure to two languages in infancy. However, the domain specificity and scope of the infant bilingual advantage in infancy remains unclear. In the present study,…

Sixty infants divided evenly between 5 and 7 months of age were tested for their knowledge of object continuity versus discontinuity with a predictive tracking task. The stimulus event consisted of a moving ball that was briefly occluded for 20 trials. Both age groups predictively tracked the ball when it disappeared and reappeared via occlusion,…

Young infants respond to positive and negative speech prosody (A. Fernald, 1993), yet 4-year-olds rely on lexical information when it conflicts with paralinguistic cues to approval or disapproval (M. Friend, 2003). This article explores this surprising phenomenon, testing one hundred eighteen 2- to 5-year-olds' use of isolated pitch cues to…

Children (aged 6-10) and adults (total N = 136) completed a novel visual perspective-taking task that allowed quantitative comparisons across age groups. All age groups found it harder to judge the other person's perspective when it differed from their own. This egocentric interference did not decrease with age, even though, overall, performance…

Fundamental to amassing a lexicon of relational terms (i.e., verbs, prepositions) is the ability to abstract and categorize spatial relations such as a figure (e.g., "boy") moving along a path (e.g., "around" the barn). Three studies examine how infants learn to categorize path over changes in "manner," or how an action is performed (e.g., running…

Fifty 8-month-old infants participated in a study of the interrelations among cognition, temperament, and electrophysiology. Better performance on a working memory task (assessed using a looking version of the A-not-B task) was associated with increases in frontal-parietal EEG coherence from baseline to task, as well as elevated levels of…

Using a means-means-ends problem-solving task, this study examined whether 16-month-old walking infants (N = 28) took into account the width of a bridge as a means for crossing a precipice and the location of a handrail as a means for augmenting balance on a narrow bridge. Infants were encouraged to cross from one platform to another over narrow…

The present work examined the discovery of linguistic cues during a word segmentation task. Whereas previous studies have focused on sensitivity to individual cues, this study addresses how individual cues may be used to discover additional, correlated cues. Twenty-four 9-month-old infants were familiarized with a speech stream in which…