Learning always happens from input that contains multiple structures and multiple sources of variability. Though infants possess learning mechanisms to locate structure in the world, lab-based experiments have rarely probed how infants contend with input that contains many different structures and cues. Two experiments explored infants' use of two…

Over the last 2 centuries there has been a rapid increase in the proportion of children who grow up in cities. However, relatively little work has explored in detail the physiological and cognitive pathways through which city life may affect early development. To assess this, we observed a cohort of infants growing up in diverse settings across…

Fragmented sleep is common in infancy. Although night awakening is known to decrease with age, in some infants night awakening is more persistent and continues into older ages. However, the influence of fragmented sleep on development is poorly known. In the present study, the longitudinal relationship between fragmented sleep and psychomotor…

Emotion regulation is essential to cognitive, social, and emotional development and difficulties with emotion regulation portend future socioemotional, academic, and behavioral difficulties. There is growing awareness that many developmental outcomes previously thought to begin their development in the postnatal period have their origins in the…

Evidence indicates that the newborn infant must first develop cognitive systems, through his experience with various stimuli, to differentiate each modality separately before he can integrate any two modalities in classical conditioning. (Author/NH)

Maintains author's interpretation of 6-month-olds' behavior is consistent with task requirements in the 2000 study and previous work showing that infants use explanatory inferences to make sense of their world. Asserts that ability to understand that people communicate with persons but act on objects is precursor to infants' understanding at 9 to…

Investigates the ability of 2-year-old children to pretend that one thing is another. Results indicate that when one thing is substituted for another, pretending varies as a function of the number of substitutions. (LLK)

Young infants use caregivers' emotional expressions to guide their behavior in novel, ambiguous situations. This skill, known as social referencing, likely involves at least 3 separate abilities: (a) looking at an adult in an unfamiliar situation, (b) associating that adult's emotion with the novel situation, and (c) regulating their own…

Revealed that 6-month-old infants are unable to access either an original memory or a reactivated memory after lengthy intervals. Despite the fact that their memory processing is more rapid during encoding and retrieval than that of infants half their age, their facility for accessing an original or reactivated memory is weaker than that of such…

Two experiments studied infants' use of remembered knowledge of auditory-visual events to guide reaching and grasping. Results indicated that reaching was initiated and completed after sound cues ceased. Accurate searching depended on subjects' experience in light presentation. Results suggest that 6 1/2-month-olds can represent unseen objects and…

Describes 4 experiments examining 10-month-old infants' causal event perception. Results from all experiments indicated that infants perceived causality of simple events by associating a specific agent with a causal action. These results provide more support for an information-processing view of causal perception than for a view that explains…

Two studies examined whether object names and functions act as cues to categories for infants. Findings indicated that both 14- and 18-month-olds were more likely to select the category match after being shown a novel category exemplar with its function than when given no additional cues. Only at 18 months did naming the objects enhance…

Used event-related potentials to examine infants' ability to form representations of stimuli presented in a haptic modality and to then recognize these stimuli as familiar when the stimuli were subsequently presented in a visual modality. Found that in certain conditions infants encoded the haptically familiarized object, then transferred their…

Two experiments investigated whether 5-month olds would look longer at rotating "drawbridge" appearing to violate physical laws because they knew it was causally impossible. Findings indicated that infants' longer gaze at 180-degree rotations was due to simple perceptual preference for more motion, challenging Baillargeon's (1987) claim…

Studied 2-year olds' understanding of pretense expressions of independent agency in scenarios in which a doll acted as the agent of a series of pretend events. Found no gender differences in the doll's imaginary intentions, but older toddlers performed reliably better than younger. Episodes requiring enacting conclusions to events that began with…