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…

Five-month-old infants were habituated to three types of visually presented rigid motion, with duration of fixation as the dependent measure. After reaching a criterion of habituation, a fourth rigid motion (not habituated) and a deformation were presented. (Author/SS)

Investigates the responsiveness of 14- and 20-week-old infants to binocular information using a stereoscopic shadow caster showing an object approaching on a collision course. (Author/SS)

Three experiments investigated four-month-old infants' capacity to perceive bimodally specified events by detecting the temporal synchrony of sound bursts with the visable impacts of surfaces. (Author/SS)

A modified Visual Expectation Paradigm assessed the role of picture content in the spatiotemporal expectations of 80 infants. Stable picture content information facilitated formation of expectations about when and where pictures would appear. Two month olds' reactions were consistently slower than those of three month olds.(LB)

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…

Recorded reaching and looking preferences and movement kinematics among 5- to 15-month-olds divided into 3 age groups. Found that 5- to 12-month-olds preferred looking first at a large object; 8.5- to 12-month-olds showed preference for reaching to smaller (graspable) objects. Kinematic measures suggested that onset of object-oriented action…

Investigated 4- and 7-month-olds' perception of transparency, using computer-generated achromatic or color displays depicting a semitransparent box occluding the center of a rod. Found that 4-month-olds indicated perception of transparency in color but not in achromatic displays. Seven-month-olds showed some evidence of transparency perception in…

Two experiments tested whether newborns could discriminate their own and another newborn's cry. Results indicated that awake newborns expressed facial distress more frequently and longer to another newborn's cry than to their own. Sucking decreased significantly between pretest phase and first minute of another infant's cry. Asleep infants'…

Two experiments examined 8-month-olds' use of absolute and relative pitch cues in a tone-sequence statistical learning task. Results suggest that, given unsegmented stimuli that do not conform to rules of musical composition, infants are more likely to track patterns of absolute pitches than of relative pitches. A third experiment found that adult…

Fourteen-month-old infants saw an object hidden inside a container and were removed from the disappearance locale for 24 hr. Upon their return, they searched correctly for the hidden object, demonstrating object permanence and long-term memory. Control infants who saw no disappearance did not search. In Experiment 2, infants returned to see the…

Three experiments examined 4- to 10-month-olds' perception of audio-visual (A-V) temporal synchrony cues in the presence or absence of rhythmic pattern cues. Results established that infants of all ages could discriminate between two different audio-visual rhythmic events. Only 10-month-olds detected a desynchronization of the auditory and visual…

Three experiments examined 4- and 6-month-olds' sensitivity to the unity of a partly occluded moving rod undergoing translation, rotation, or oscillation. Findings suggested that all types of common motion were not equivalent for specifying infants' perceptions of occluded objects. (Author)

Studied the early development of exploratory behavior in 99 infants of 2-5 months. Results show that there are significant changes in spontaneous multimodal exploration of a novel object between 2 and 5 months. (RJC)