In this longitudinal study, we investigated the factor structure and stability of early-life temperament in a German sample, using three measures developed within Rothbart's psychobiological approach. Temperament was measured using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised (IBQ-R) at the ages of 6 and 12 months, the Early Childhood Behavior…

Understanding of preterm infant cognitive competences across the first year of life is limited regarding the developmental constructs of continuity, stability, coherence, and predictive validity as well as how they manifest by age and country of origin. This prospective longitudinal study examined and compared mean-level continuity,…

There is a need to identify children with potential mental health issues early in order to provide "an ounce of prevention." Unfortunately, there are few instruments available to identify emotional and behavioral issues in infants and many never receive intervention. We developed the Brief Child and Family Intake and Outcomes System for…

Premature infants have significant risk for later behavior problems. This study examined growth trajectories of three problem behaviors across five developmental age points from preschool to early adulthood in a well-characterized sample of premature infants. The effects of neonatal risk, gender, and socioeconomic context were modeled on these…

Background: Although plausible links between language development and personality have been suggested, longitudinal studies of these associations into adulthood have not been conducted. Aim: To investigate whether children's age at attaining language milestones is associated with later adult personality. Methods: Mothers' of 8,400 children from…

Findings from previous cross-sectional studies showed that while toddlers around their first birthday imitate selectively, that is, they systematically omit some kinds of target action steps or they copy only the goal, but not the means of the modeled actions, older toddlers imitate more exactly. The aim of the present article is to provide…

Infants' preference for faces was investigated in a cross-sectional sample of 75 children, aged 3 to 11 months, and 23 adults. A visual preference paradigm was used where pairs of faces and toys were presented side-by-side while eye gaze was recorded. In addition, motor activity was assessed via parent report and the relation between motor…

Object construction involves organizing multiple objects into a unified structure (e.g., stacking blocks into a tower) and may provide infants with unique spatial information. Because object construction entails placing objects in spatial locations relative to one another, infants can acquire information about spatial relations during construction…

Attention-orienting and attention-holding effects of faces were investigated in a sample of 64 children, aged 4 to 8 months old. A visual preference task was used, in which pairs of faces and toys were presented in eight 10-second trials. Effects of age and sitting-ability were examined. Attention-orienting toward faces was measured using the…

When face processing studies find sex differences, male infants appear better at face recognition than female infants, whereas female adults appear better at face recognition than male adults. Both female infants and adults, however, discriminate emotional expressions better than males. To investigate if sex and age differences in facial scanning…

The study of development vacillates between a focus on change (i.e., studying how and why infants are so different from adults) and excitement about early competence and continuity (i.e., studying how capable infants are, and marveling at how similar they turn out to be to adults). The study of memory development has been no exception. This…

Although human infants demonstrate early competence to retain visual information, memory capacities during infancy remain largely undocumented. In three experiments, we used a Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) task to examine abilities to encode identity (Experiment 1) and spatial properties (Experiments 2a and 2b) of unfamiliar complex visual…

Research has previously shown a gap of near 0.5 of a standard deviation (SD) in cognition and language development between the top and bottom household wealth quartile in children aged 6-42 months in a large representative sample of low- and middle-income families in Bogota, using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development. The gaps in…

The present study investigated whether infants visually scan own- and other-race faces differently as well as how these differences in face scanning develop with age. A multi-method approach was used to analyze the eye-tracking data of 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants scanning dynamically displayed own- and other-race faces. We found that…

Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old…