Fourteen-month-olds selectively imitated a sub-efficient means (illuminating a lightbox by a head-touch) when this was modeled by linguistic ingroup members in video-demonstrations. A follow-up study with slightly older infants, however, could replicate this effect only in a video-demonstration context. Hence it still remains unclear whether…

An ability to detect the common location of multisensory stimulation is essential for us to perceive a coherent environment, to represent the interface between the body and the external world, and to act on sensory information. Regarding the tactile environment "at hand", we need to represent somatosensory stimuli impinging on the skin…

Fragmented sleep is common in infancy. Although night awakening is known to decrease with age, in some infants night awakening is more persistent and continues into older ages. However, the influence of fragmented sleep on development is poorly known. In the present study, the longitudinal relationship between fragmented sleep and psychomotor…

Saccade latency is widely used across infant psychology to investigate infants' understanding of events. Interpreting particular latency values requires knowledge of standard saccadic RTs, but there is no consensus as to typical values. This study provides standard estimates of infants' (n = 194, ages 9 to 15 months) saccadic RTs under a range of…

The development of theory of mind (ToM) in infancy has been mainly documented through studies conducted on a single age group with a single task. Very few studies have examined ToM abilities other than false belief, and very few studies have used a within-subjects design. During 2 testing sessions, infants aged 14 and 18 months old were…

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…

Objective: To chart the emergence of precursors and early signs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and autistic traits in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a prospective longitudinal cohort study of the surviving offspring of 14,541 pregnant women from southwestern England with an expected delivery date between April 1991 and…

This study examined both differential patterns and the stability of infants' (N = 70) distress reactivity across mother and stranger arm-restraint conditions when infants were 6 and 9 months of age. Reactivity measures included observational variables for the rise, intensity, and duration of infant distress as well as motor activities associated…

This study examined contributions of maternal personality and infant temperament to infant vocabulary and cognitive development both directly and indirectly through parental stress. Participants were recruited at birth and included 63 infant twin pairs and their mothers. Assessments were completed at 6, 9, 12, and 18 months of age and included…

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…

Purpose: The ontogeny of mandibular control is important for understanding the general neurophysiologic development for speech and alimentary behaviors. Prior investigations suggest that mandibular control is organized distinctively across speech and nonspeech tasks in 15-month-olds and adults and that, with development, these extant forms of…

Although a large literature discusses infants' preference for infant-directed speech (IDS), few studies have examined how this preference might change over time or across listening situations. The work reported here compares infants' preference for IDS while listening in a quiet versus a noisy environment, and across 3 points in development: 4.5…

Two studies examined whether object names and functions act as cues to categories for infants. Findings indicated that both 14- and 18-month-olds were more likely to select the category match after being shown a novel category exemplar with its function than when given no additional cues. Only at 18 months did naming the objects enhance…

Investigates preperceptual auditory storage among eight 9-week-old infants in three experiments using a modification of an adult masking paradigm and a nonnutritive sucking discrimination procedure. Results suggest that echoic storage contributes to auditory perception in infancy and, for infants compared to adults, echoic traces have a longer…

Investigated 4- and 7-month-olds' perception of transparency, using computer-generated achromatic or color displays depicting a semitransparent box occluding the center of a rod. Found that 4-month-olds indicated perception of transparency in color but not in achromatic displays. Seven-month-olds showed some evidence of transparency perception in…