The two aims of the study were (a) to determine when infants begin to use force intentionally to defend objects to which they might have a claim and (b) to examine the relationship between toddlers' instrumental use of force and their tendencies to make possession claims. Infants' and toddlers' reactions to peers' attempts to take their toys were…

How do young children direct their attention to other people in the natural world? Although many studies have examined the perception of faces and of goal-directed actions, relatively little work has focused on what children will look at in complex and unconstrained viewing environments. To address this question, we showed videos of objects,…

The effect of background television on 6- and 12-month-olds' attention during 20 min of toy play was examined. During the first or second half of the session, a clip from a variety of commonly available television programs was presented. The duration and frequency of infants' looks to the toys and to the television indicated that regardless of age…

The relations among infant anger reactivity, approach behavior, and frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry, and their relations to inhibitory control and behavior problems in early childhood were examined within the context of a longitudinal study of temperament. Two hundred nine infants' anger expressions to arm restraint were observed at 4…

Behne, Carpenter, Call, and Tomasello (2005) showed that 9- to 18-month-olds, but not 6-month-olds, differentiated between people who were unwilling and unable to share toys. As the outcome of the two tasks is the same (i.e., the toy is not shared), the infants must respond to the different goals of the actor. However, visual habituation paradigms…

Infants follow the gaze of an individual with whom they are directly interacting by the end of the first year. By 18 months infants are capable of learning novel words in observational (or third-party) contexts (Floor & Akhtar, 2006). To examine third-party gaze following in 12- and 18-month-olds, the parent and experimenter engaged in a…