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.…

Exposure to communicative gestures, through their parents' use of gestures, is associated with infants' language development. However, the mechanisms supporting this link are not fully understood. In adults, sensorimotor brain activity occurs while processing communicative stimuli, including both spoken language and gestures. Using…

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…

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'…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

Infants learn nouns during object-naming events--moments when caregivers name the object of infants' play (e.g., ball as infant holds a ball). Do caregivers also label the actions of infants' play (e.g., roll as infant rolls a ball)? We investigated connections between mothers' verb inputs and infants' actions. We video-recorded 32 infant-mother…

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…

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…

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…

The study of infants' interactive style and social stress response to repeated stress exposures is of great interest for developmental and clinical psychologists. Stable maternal and dyadic behavior is critical to sustain infants' development of an adaptive social stress response, but the association between infants' interactive style and social…

Given the centrality of prosociality in everyday social functioning, understanding the factors and mechanisms underlying the origins of prosocial development is of critical importance. This experiment investigated whether experience with reciprocal object exchanges can drive the developmental onset of sharing behavior. Seven-month-old infants took…