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.…

We assessed whether the negative association between maternal postpartum depression (PPD) and infants' development of joint attention (gaze following) generalizes from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) to Majority World contexts. The study was conducted in Bhutan (N = 105, M = 278 days, 52% males) but also draws from…

Infant motor development is affected by the sociocultural context in which it takes place. Because societal and cultural practices are dynamic, this exploratory study examined whether the ages at which infants typically learned to crawl, cruise, and walk changed over the past 3 decades. We compiled archival data from 1,306 infants born between…

How do age and the acquisition of independent walking relate to changes in infants' everyday experiences? We used a novel ecological momentary assessment (EMA) method to gather caregiver reports of infants' restraint, body position, and object holding via text messages sparsely sampled across multiple days of home life at 10, 11, 12, and 13 months…

Early mother-infant coordinated interactions play a critical role in infant development. The present study describes the development of the dyadic coordination of vocalization and gaze behavior between mothers and infants over the first year of life. In addition to describing developmental trajectories of behavior, the study contributes to our…

Emotions remain something of a mystery for most of us even when we accept their centrality to development in general and to infancy in particular. I make 2 arguments in this paper. One: that the most crucial thing about emotions is that they allow mutuality of engagement with other emotional beings--not only evoking responses, but also provoking…

Early exploratory behaviors have been proposed to facilitate children's learning, impacting motor, cognitive, language, and social development. This study related the performance of behaviors used to explore oneself to behaviors used to explore objects, and then related both types of exploratory behaviors to motor, language, and cognitive measures…

Dysregulation of diurnalcortisol rhythms is often seen among children exposed to early adversity and has been associated with a variety of negative physical and mental health outcomes. The present study examined whether two indicators of deprivation, sociodemographic burden and observed parental insensitivity, were associated with child diurnal…

The present study examined genetic, prenatal, and postnatal environmental pathways in the intergenerational transmission of anxiety and depressive symptoms from parents to early adolescents (when these symptoms start to increase), while considering timing effects of exposure to parent anxiety and depressive symptoms postnatally. The sample was…

Presenting pictures of faces side by side is a common paradigm to assess infants' attentional biases according to social categories, such as gender, race, and language. However, seeing static faces does not represent infants' typical experience of the social world, which involves people in motion and performing actions. Here, we assessed infants'…

The second year of life is a time of formative developmental change as basic behavioral systems undergo rapid integration and expansion. This study examined the developmental trajectories of social-emotional (SoE) outcomes and the effects of infant sex and household chaos (HC) on the development of SoE outcomes across the second year of life. The…

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity of eye-tracking methods to evaluate infant and toddler interpretation of visual stimuli. The application of these methods makes it increasingly important to understand the development of infant sensitivity to the perceptual properties implicated in such methods. In light of recent studies that…

New motor skills supply infants with new possibilities for action and have consequences for development in unexpected places. For example, the transition from crawling to walking is accompanied by gains in other abilities--better ways to move, see the world, and engage in social interactions (e.g., Adolph & Tamis-LeMonda, 2014). Do the…

To benefit from the exploration of their bodies and their physical and social environments, infants need to detect sensorimotor contingencies linking their actions to sensory feedback. This ability, which seems to be present in babies from birth and even in utero, has been widely used by researchers in their study of early development. However, a…

This review challenges the traditional interpretation of infants' and young children's responses to three types of potentially "fear-inducing" stimuli--snakes and spiders, heights, and strangers. The traditional account is that these stimuli are the objects of infants' earliest developing fears. We present evidence against the…