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…

To examine key parameters of the initial conditions in early category learning, two studies compared 5-month-olds' object categorization between tasks involving previously unseen novel objects, and between measures within tasks. Infants in Experiment 1 participated in a visual familiarization-novelty preference (VFNP) task with two-dimensional…

Infants search for an object hidden by an occluder in the light months later than one hidden by darkness. One explanation attributes this decalage to easier action demands in darkness versus occlusion, whereas another attributes it to easier representation demands in darkness versus occlusion. However, search tasks typically confound these two…

Previous studies have shown that infants, including newborns, can match previously unseen and unheard human faces and vocalizations. More recently, it has been reported that infants as young as 4 months of age also can match the faces and vocalizations of other species raising the possibility that such broad multisensory perceptual tuning is…

Eye-trackers suitable for use with infants are now marketed by several commercial vendors. As eye-trackers become more prevalent in infancy research, there is the potential for users to be unaware of dangers lurking "under the hood" if they assume the eye-tracker introduces no errors in measuring infants' gaze. Moreover, the influx of voluminous…

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…

This paper presents two methods that we applied to our research to record infant gaze in the context of goal-oriented actions using different eye-tracking devices: head-mounted and remote eye-tracking. For each type of eye-tracking system, we discuss their advantages and disadvantages, describe the particular experimental setups we used to study…

The aim of this study was to examine the combined influences of infants' attention and use of social cues in the prediction of their language outcomes. This longitudinal study measured infants' visual attention on a distractibility task (11 months), joint attention (14 months), and language outcomes (word-object association, 14 months; MBCDI…

Two preferential-reaching experiments explored 5- and 7-month-olds' sensitivity to pictorial depth cues. In the first experiment, infants viewed a display in which texture gradients, linear perspective of the surface contours, and relative height in the visual field provided information that two objects were at different distances. Five- and…

In the present study, we examined if young infants can extract information regarding the directionality of biological motion. We report that 6-month-old infants can differentiate leftward and rightward motions from a movie depicting the sagittal view of an upright human point-light walker, walking as if on a treadmill. Inversion of the stimuli…

Infant's face preferences have previously been assessed in displays containing 1 or 2 faces. Here we present 6-month-old infants with a complex visual array containing faces among multiple visual objects. Despite the competing objects, infants direct their first saccade toward faces more frequently than expected by chance (Experiment 1). The…

Previous work has shown that 4-month-olds can discriminate between two-dimensional (2D) depictions of structurally possible and impossible objects [S. M. Shuwairi (2009), "Journal of Experimental Child Psychology", 104, 115; S. M. Shuwairi, M. K. Albert, & S. P. Johnson (2007), "Psychological Science", 18, 303]. Here, we asked whether evidence of…

The aim of this study is to investigate whether newborns detect a face on the basis of a Gestalt representation based on first-order relational information (i.e., the basic arrangement of face features) by using Mooney stimuli. The incomplete 2-tone Mooney stimuli were used because they preclude focusing both on the local features (i.e., the fine…

Electrophysiological work in nonhuman primates has established the existence of multiple types of signals in the temporal lobe that contribute to recognition memory, including information regarding a stimulus's relative novelty, familiarity, and recency of occurrence. We used high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether young…

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…