Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not…

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75%…

Research has documented elevated experiences of racial discrimination among African American families, and its adverse impacts on their psychological well-being. However, most studies have investigated the experiences of and consequences for older children and adults. The goal of the current study was to examine the relations among mothers'…

Over the past 50 years, scientists have made amazing discoveries about the origins of human language acquisition. Central to this field of study is the process by which infants' perceptual sensitivities gradually align with native language structure, known as "perceptual narrowing." Perceptual narrowing offers a theoretical account of…

The current study is the first to examine the role of exploration in play milestones development using a multi-measure micro-analytic approach. Fifteen infants, between the ages of 8 and 17 months, were observed in their natural home environment once a month for a one--hour session; their spontaneous mouthing and fingering and their play level…

Developmental psychology focuses on how psychological constructs change with age. In cognitive development research, however, the specifics of this emergence is often underspecified. Researchers often provisionally assume linear growth by including chronological age as a predictor in regression models. In this work, we aim to evaluate this…

Infants are born highly sensitive to the natural patterns found in languages. They use their perceptual sensitivity to acquire detailed information about the structure of languages in their environment. To date, most studies of infant perception and early language acquisition have investigated spoken/auditory languages and hearing infants (e.g.…

The behavior of newborns is ambiguous. Cultural models--representations shared by members of a community--provide new parents and others with a cognitive and motivational structure to understand them. This study asks members of several cultural groups (total n = 100) to judge the "similarity" of behavioral items in the Neonatal…

This study establishes a sequence of developing mental state understandings in infants. We used three violation-of-expectation paradigms to assess fifty-seven 16-month-olds' ability to (a) infer an actress's intention from her prior repeated approaches to an object, (b) recognize her emotion by watching her facial-emotional display, and (c) deduce…

Maternal singing is considered vital to infant well-being. This study focuses on vocal emotion expressions in infant-directed singing among mothers in war conditions. It examines the questions: (a) how traumatic war events and mental health problems are associated with the content and valence of vocal emotion expressions and (b) how these emotion…

The meaning, mechanism, and function of imitation in early infancy have been actively discussed since Meltzoff and Moore's (1977) report of facial and manual imitation by human neonates. Oostenbroek et al. (2016) claim to challenge the existence of early imitation and to counter all interpretations so far offered. Such claims, if true, would have…

Emotion regulation is essential to cognitive, social, and emotional development and difficulties with emotion regulation portend future socioemotional, academic, and behavioral difficulties. There is growing awareness that many developmental outcomes previously thought to begin their development in the postnatal period have their origins in the…

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…

Learning always happens from input that contains multiple structures and multiple sources of variability. Though infants possess learning mechanisms to locate structure in the world, lab-based experiments have rarely probed how infants contend with input that contains many different structures and cues. Two experiments explored infants' use of two…

Introduction: Although recent research has focused on the effects of maternal eating disorders (EDs) on children, little is known about the effect of maternal EDs on neurobiological outcomes in newborns and infants. This study is the first to investigate neurobehavioural regulation and cognitive development in newborns and infants of mothers with…