This article presents a tentatively "balanced" view (i.e., midway between lean and rich interpretations) of pointing behavior in infants and apes, based upon the notion of intentional reading of behavior without simultaneous attribution of unobservable mental states. This can account for the complexity of infant pointing without attributing…

This study examined the development of joint attention in 95 infants assessed between 9 and 18 months of age. Infants displayed significant test-retest reliability on measures of following gaze and gestures (responding to joint attention, RJA) and in their use of eye contact to establish social attention coordination (initiating joint attention,…

Twelve-month-old infants attribute goals to both familiar, human agents and unfamiliar, non-human agents. They also attribute goal-directedness to both familiar actions and unfamiliar ones. Four conditions examined information 12-month-olds use to determine which actions of an unfamiliar agent are goal-directed. Infants who witnessed the agent…

When viewing an event in which an object moves behind an occluder on part of its trajectory, 4-month-old infants perceive the trajectory as continuous only when time or distance out of sight is short. Little is known, however, about the conditions under which young infants perceive trajectories to be discontinuous. In the present studies we focus…

This study was designed to test two alternate hypotheses regarding the meaning of increased lateral head movements in infants during experiments in which the mothers' voices were displaced from their faces. One interpretation is that the lateral looking responses of the infants are attributable to maturational effects on the infants' physiological…

Studies of the infant's distribution of attention to stimuli of varying complexity, and of his differential attention to familiar versus novel stimuli (discrepancy), have attempted to shed light on the development of cognitive structures in the non-verbal infant. The subjects have typically been normal infants ages 4 to 6 months. For testing, the…

The following are sketched in outline form: (1) functional antecedents and their implications for language--assimilation, accommodation, circular reactions/ feedback processes, classification, discrimination, functional equivalence, representation, transformation, communications; (2) semantic antecedents and their implications for language--human…

Examines the effects of an extra five minutes of interaction on the psychomotor and mental development of Iranian infant orphans largely deprived of opportunities to interact with caretakers and peers. Daily intervention continued for six weeks; effects were assessed after a 6-month interval. (RH)

The conclusion from these results is that while prenatal anomalies or an impoverished home environment may retard development, in the majority of cases the environmental conditions fall within the limits of sufficiency that permit the genetic blueprint to determine the course of infant development. (Authors)

Presents experimental findings that indicate that some number capacity is present in 22-week old infants, long before the onset of verbal counting. Suggests that verbal counting may have precursors present during infancy. (CS)

Finds that the object concept scores of 104 infants were relatively independent of IQ and background variables, showing that object concept is the most stable developing function in infants and an accurate reflection of infant cognitive potential. (RL)

Two experiments examined six-month-olds' ability to form an abstract containment category. Results indicated that, after habituation to object pairs in a containment relation, infants looked reliably longer at an example of an unfamiliar versus familiar containment relation, indicating that they could form a categorical representation of…

Two studies investigated development of infants' visual preferences for the human body shape. Results indicated that 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for scrambled body shapes over typical body shapes in line drawings, while 12- and 15-month-olds did not respond differentially. In condition using photographs, only 18-month-olds had reliable…

Nine experiments examined 6- to 10-month-olds' formation of an abstract category representation for "between." Findings indicated that older, but not younger infants, could form an abstract category representation for "between" when performing in an object-variation version of the between categorization task. Six- to…