Since birth, infants develop the ability to perceive a wide range of intersensory relations among various kinds of amodal temporal information. This study addresses the development of the ability to perceive duration-based intersensory relations. Three groups of infants, four, seven and 10 months old, participated in two trials of an intersensory…

Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated…

Extracting the statistical regularities present in the environment is a central learning mechanism in infancy. For instance, infants are able to learn the associations between simultaneously or successively presented visual objects (Fiser & Aslin, 2002; Kirkham, Slemmer & Johnson, 2002). The present study extends these results by…

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…

This study examined differences in visual attention as a function of label learning from 6 to 9 months of age. Before and after 3 months of parent-directed storybook training with computer-generated novel objects, event-related potentials and visual fixations were recorded while infants viewed trained and untrained images (n = 23). Relative to a…

This study examines face-scanning behaviors of infants at 6, 9, and 12 months as they watched videos of a woman describing an object in front of her. The videos were created to vary information in the mouth (speaking vs. smiling) and the eyes (gazing into the camera vs. cueing the infant with head turn or gaze direction to an object being…

This study examined the effects of program pacing, defined as the rate of scene and character change per minute, on infants' visual attention to video presentations. Seventy-two infants (twenty-four 6-month-olds, twenty-four 9-month-olds, twenty-four 12-month-olds) were exposed to one of two sets of high- and low-paced commercial infant DVDs. Each…

No evidence had been provided so far of newborns' capacity to give a matching response to 2D stimuli. We report evidence from 18 newborns who were presented with three types of stimuli on a 2D screen. The stimuli were video-recorded displays of tongue protrusion shown by: (a) a human face, (b) a human tongue from a disembodied mouth, and (c) an…

Imitation requires the imitator to solve the correspondence problem--to translate visual information from modelled action into matching motor output. It has been widely accepted for some 30 years that the correspondence problem is solved by a specialized, innate cognitive mechanism. This is the conclusion of a poverty of the stimulus argument,…

We examined two aspects of temperamental approach in early infancy, positive reactivity and anger, and their unique and combined influences on maternal reports of child surgency and attention focusing at 4 years of age. One hundred and fourteen infants were observed for their positive reactions to novel stimuli at 4 months, and their anger…

Despite hundreds of studies describing infants' visual exploration of experimental stimuli, researchers know little about where infants look during everyday interactions. The current study describes the first method for studying visual behavior during natural interactions in mobile infants. Six 14-month-old infants wore a head-mounted eye-tracker…

The study of visual attention in infants has used presentation of single simple stimuli, multi-dimensional stimuli, and complex dynamic video presentations. There are both continuities and discontinuities in the findings on attention and attentiveness to stimulus complexity. A continuity is a pattern of looking that is found in the early part of…

Recent studies suggest that even infants attend to others' beliefs in order to make sense of their behavior. To warrant the assumption of early belief understanding, corresponding competences need to be demonstrated in a variety of different belief-inducing situations. The present study provides corresponding evidence, using a completely nonverbal…

Infants (n = 24, mean age 13 months and n = 24, mean age 19 months) were tested on an extension of the method introduced by Tomasello and Haberl (2003) to examine the understanding of another person's interest in a novel object. Four objects were presented serially. For two objects, infants played with an experimenter. The infant played with one…

The current study tested whether the purely amodal cue of contingency elicits orientation following behavior in 8-month-old infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with automated objects without human features that did or did not react contingently to the infants' fixations recorded by an eye tracker. We found that an object's occasional…