Two experiments investigated 9-month-old infants' abilities to recognize the correspondence between an actual three-dimensional (3D) object and its two-dimensional (2D) representation, looking specifically at representations that did not literally depict the actual object: schematic line drawings. In Experiment 1, infants habituated to a line…

Research suggests that nonlinguistic sequence learning abilities are an important contributor to language development (Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010). The current study investigated visual sequence learning (VSL) as a possible predictor of vocabulary development in infants. Fifty-eight 8.5-month-old infants were presented with a…

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to monitor infant brain activity during the initial encoding of a previously novel visual stimulus, and examined whether ERP measures of encoding predicted infants' subsequent performance on a visual memory task (i.e., the paired-comparison task). A late slow wave component of the ERP measured…

This study examined the developmental course of infants' attentional preferences for 3 types of infant-directed affective intent, which have been shown to be commonly used at particular ages in the first year of life. Specifically, Kitamura and Burnham (2003) found mothers' tone of voice in infant-directed speech is most comforting between birth…

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…

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests a gradual, experience-dependent specialization of cortical face processing systems that takes place largely in the 1st year of life. To further investigate these findings, event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from typically developing 9-month-old infants presented with pictures of…

We used an encoder version of cascade correlation to simulate Younger and Cohen's (1983, 1986) finding that 10-month-olds recover attention on the basis of correlations among stimulus features, but 4- and 7-month-olds recover attention on the basis of stimulus features. We captured these effects by varying the score threshold parameter in cascade…

From Aesop to Sun Tzu, the importance of working together has long been acknowledged. Yet as long as cooperation has existed, so have the difficulties associated with it. Pooling two fields might mean twice the power, but this union also brings twice the jargon, twice the competing theories, and twice the head butting. Nonetheless, in this…

Computational models of infant categorization often fail to elaborate the transitional mechanisms that allow infants to achieve adult performance. In this article, we apply a successful connectionist model of adult category learning to developmental data. The Supervised and Unsupervised Stratified Adaptive Incremental Network (SUSTAIN) model is…