This study examined whether 9.5-month-olds could use featural information to individuate objects. Results suggest that infants categorize events involving opaque and transparent occluders as the same kind of situation and that infants are more likely to give evidence of individuation when they need to reason about one kind of event than when they…

Two experiments investigated 8-, 10-, and 12-month-old infants' levels of searching for mothers, strangers, and objects. Found that, overall, 10- and 12-month-old infants had higher levels of searching for mothers, whereas youngest infants showed no differences for searching. This discrepancy is likely due to social cognitive development and…

Used event-related potentials to examine infants' ability to form representations of stimuli presented in a haptic modality and to then recognize these stimuli as familiar when the stimuli were subsequently presented in a visual modality. Found that in certain conditions infants encoded the haptically familiarized object, then transferred their…

Five experiments examined 15- and 18-month olds' sensitivity to morphosyntactic dependencies. Results indicated that 18-month olds, but not 15-month olds, were sensitive to basic relationship between "is" and "-ing" and that 18-month-olds could track relationships between functor morphemes. Findings were consistent with hypothesis that 18-month…

Two experiments investigated whether 5-month olds would look longer at rotating "drawbridge" appearing to violate physical laws because they knew it was causally impossible. Findings indicated that infants' longer gaze at 180-degree rotations was due to simple perceptual preference for more motion, challenging Baillargeon's (1987) claim…

Four experiments examined 8-month-olds' ability to reason about collections of objects. Findings suggested that infants' expectations about object behavior do not automatically apply to any and all portions of matter within the visual field. The behavior of an entity and infants' prior experience played roles in determining whether infants will…

Familiarized 6- and 8-month-olds with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. Found that only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. Results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the…

Tested in six experiments young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in faces and voices. Found that 4.5-month-olds showed no evidence of matching face and voice based on gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match based on the vowel. Robust evidence of ability to match based on gender was not evident…

Several investigators find that infants fail to use property information to individuate objects until 12 months of age (e.g., Xu & Carey, 1996), while others find that infants successfully employ property information in the service of object individuation at 9.5 months (e.g., Wilcox & Baillargeon, 1998a). This study investigated…

The effects of prenatal stress on cognition and behavioral fearfulness in infants are studied. The findings suggest that mechanisms by which mental development and fearfulness are affected by prenatal stress are different and do not present a consistent relation.

Aim: Cognitive visual dysfunctions (CVDs) reflect an impairment of the capacity to process visual information. The question of whether CVDs might be classifiable according to the nature and distribution of the underlying brain damage is an intriguing one in child neuropsychology. Method: We studied 22 children born preterm (12 males, 10 females;…

The importance of eye gaze as a means of communication is indisputable. However, there is debate about whether there is a dedicated neural module, which functions as an eye gaze detector and when infants are able to use eye gaze cues in a referential way. The application of neuroscience methodologies to developmental psychology has provided new…

The prediction of events and the creation of expectancies about their time course is a crucial aspect of an infant's mental life, but temporal mechanisms underlying these predictions are obscure. Scalar timing, in which the ratio of mean durations to their standard deviations is held constant, enables a person to use an estimate of the mean for…

Adults have little difficulty perceiving objects as complete despite occlusion, but newborn infants perceive moving partly occluded objects solely in terms of visible surfaces. The developmental mechanisms leading to perceptual completion have never been adequately explained. Here, the authors examine the potential contributions of oculomotor…

Children born preterm exhibit working memory deficits. These deficits may be associated with structural brain changes observed in the neonatal period. In this study, the relationship between neonatal regional brain volumes and working memory deficits at age 2 years were investigated, with a particular interest in the dorsolateral prefrontal…