The development of attention to dynamic faces versus objects providing synchronous audiovisual versus silent visual stimulation was assessed in a large sample of infants. Maintaining attention to the faces and voices of people speaking is critical for perceptual, cognitive, social, and language development. However, no studies have systematically…

The present studies examined the role of linguistic experience in directing English and Mandarin learners' attention to aspects of a visual scene. Specifically, they asked whether young language learners in these 2 cultures attend to differential aspects of a word-learning situation. Two groups of English and Mandarin learners, 6-8-month-olds (n =…

Recent evidence suggests that adults selectively attend to features of action, such as how a hand contacts an object, and less to configural properties of action, such as spatial trajectory, when observing human actions. The current research investigated whether this bias develops in infancy. We utilized a habituation paradigm to assess…

We investigated the development of the other-race effect "ORE" in a longitudinal sample of 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old Caucasian infants. Previous research using cross-sectional samples has shown an unstable ORE at 3 months, an increase at 6 months and full development at 9 months. In Experiment 1, we tested whether 9-month-olds showed the…

A growing body of research indicates connections exist between action, perception, and cognition in infants. In this study, associated changes between sitting ability and upright face processing were tested in 111 infants. Using the visual habituation "switch" task (C. H. Cashon & L. B. Cohen, 2004; L. B. Cohen & C. H. Cashon, 2001), holistic…

Two experiments examined infants' ability to form a spatial category when habituated to few (only 2) or many (6) exemplars of a spatial relation. Sixty-four infants of 10 months and 64 infants of 14 months were habituated to dynamic events in which a toy was placed in a consistent spatial relation ("in" or "on") to a referent…

A large-scale ("N" = 552) controlled multivariate prospective 14-year longitudinal study of a developmental cascade embedded in a developmental system showed that information-processing efficiency in infancy (4 months), general mental development in toddlerhood (18 months), behavior difficulties in early childhood (36 months),…

The present study examined infants' capability of extracting object unity in a stationary two-dimensional rod-and-box display. The infants were habituated to a centre-occluded rod and were afterwards tested with both a broken rod and a complete rod. The looking pattern of both female and male participants aged 8 months did not reveal the ability…

The development of the "inversion" effect in face processing was examined in infants 3 to 6 months of age by testing their integration of the internal and external features of upright and inverted faces using a variation of the "switch" visual habituation paradigm. When combined with previous findings showing that 7-month-olds use integrative…