The goal of this study was to examine developmental change in visual attention to dynamic visual and audiovisual stimuli in 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old infants. Infant look duration was measured during exposure to dynamic geometric patterns and Sesame Street video clips under three different stimulus modality conditions: unimodal visual, synchronous…

This study examines face-scanning behaviors of infants at 6, 9, and 12 months as they watched videos of a woman describing an object in front of her. The videos were created to vary information in the mouth (speaking vs. smiling) and the eyes (gazing into the camera vs. cueing the infant with head turn or gaze direction to an object being…

This study examined the effect of attention in young infants on the saccadic localization of dynamic peripheral stimuli presented on complex and interesting backgrounds. Infants at 14, 20, and 26 weeks of age were presented with scenes from a Sesame Street movie until fixation on a moving character occurred and then presented with a second segment…

Infants greatly refine their ability to discriminate language sounds by 12 months, yet 14-month-olds appear to confuse similar-sounding novel words. Two explanations could account for this phenomenon: infants initially have incomplete phoneme representations, suggesting developmental discontinuity; or word-learning demands interfere with use of…

We examined two aspects of temperamental approach in early infancy, positive reactivity and anger, and their unique and combined influences on maternal reports of child surgency and attention focusing at 4 years of age. One hundred and fourteen infants were observed for their positive reactions to novel stimuli at 4 months, and their anger…

Despite the use of visual habituation over the past half century, relatively little is known about its underlying processes. We analyzed heart rate (HR) taken simultaneous with looking during infant-controlled habituation sessions collected longitudinally at 4, 6, and 8 months of age with the goal of examining how HR and HR-defined phases of…

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…

In this study, we asked whether 14- and 18-month-old infants use the experiences they have previously shared with others when deciding what to point to for them declaratively. After sharing a particular type of referent with an adult in an excited manner, 18-month-olds subsequently found a picture of that type of referent more worthy of…

Infants (n = 24, mean age 13 months and n = 24, mean age 19 months) were tested on an extension of the method introduced by Tomasello and Haberl (2003) to examine the understanding of another person's interest in a novel object. Four objects were presented serially. For two objects, infants played with an experimenter. The infant played with one…

Like faces, bodies are significant sources of social information. However, research suggests that infants do not develop body representation (i.e., knowledge about typical human bodies) until the second year of life, although they are sensitive to facial information much earlier. Yet, previous research only examined whether infants are sensitive…

What kind of featural information do infants rely on when they are trying to recognize a previously seen object? The question of whether infants use certain features (e.g., shape or color) more than others (e.g., luminance) can only be studied legitimately if visual salience is controlled, as the magnitude of feature values--how noticeable and…

The contribution of motion and feature invariant information in infants' discrimination of maternal versus female stranger faces was assessed. Using an infant controlled habituation--dishabituation procedure, 4- and 8-month-old infants (N = 62) were tested for their ability to discriminate between their mother and a female stranger in 4 different…

Recently, infant researchers have reported sex differences in infants' capacity to map their representation of an occlusion sequence onto a subsequent no-occlusion display. The research reported here sought to identify the extent to which these sex differences are observed in event-mapping tasks and to identify the underlying basis for these…

Although it is generally accepted that labels facilitate categorization in infancy, recent evidence suggests that infants and young children are more likely to process visual input when presented in isolation than when paired with nonlinguistic sounds or linguistic labels. These findings suggest that auditory input (when compared to a no-auditory…

Developmental studies of face processing have revealed age-related changes in how infants allocate neurophysiological resources to the face of a caregiver and an unfamiliar adult. We hypothesize that developmental changes in how infants interact with their caregiver are related to the changes in brain response. We studied 6-month-olds because this…