This work is a part of 'baby studies' as a specific field of research. The aim of the paper is to explore how the directionality of the lines of wandering inform us about babies' sense-making and which kinds of lines of wandering children enact in day-care. The application of cartographic maps and participative observation are proposed as…

Research indicates that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are superior at local processing while the integration of local features to global percepts is reduced. Here, we compared infants at familiar risk for ASD to typically developing infants in terms of global coherence processing at 5 months of age, using steady state visually…

Two significant questions in cognitive and developmental science are first, whether objects and events are selected for attention based on their features (featural processing) or the configuration of their features (configural processing), and second, how these modes of processing develop. These questions have been addressed in part with…

Across languages and event types (i.e., agentive and nonagentive motion, transfer, change of state, attach/detach), goal paths are privileged over source paths in the linguistic encoding of events. Furthermore, some linguistic analyses suggest that goal paths are more central than source paths in the semantic and syntactic structure of motion…

In the world, the manners and paths of motion events take place together, but in language, these features are expressed separately. How do infants learn to process motion events in linguistically appropriate ways? Forty-six English-learning 7- to 9-month-olds were habituated to a motion event in which a character performed both a manner and a…

This study investigated how infants perceive and interpret human body movement. We recorded the eye movements and pupil sizes of 9- and 12-month-old infants and of adults (N = 14 per group) as they observed animation clips of biomechanically possible and impossible arm movements performed by a human and by a humanoid robot. Both 12-month-old…

Almost all locomotor animals are sensitive to optical expansion (visual looming) and for most animals this sensitivity is evident very early in their development. In humans there is evidence that responses to looming stimuli begin in the first 6 weeks of life, but here we demonstrate that as children become independent their perceptual acuity…

In the present study, we examined if young infants can extract information regarding the directionality of biological motion. We report that 6-month-old infants can differentiate leftward and rightward motions from a movie depicting the sagittal view of an upright human point-light walker, walking as if on a treadmill. Inversion of the stimuli…

Does real time coupling between mental and physical activity early in development have functional significance? To address this question, we examined the habituation of visual attention and the subsequent response to change in two groups of 3-month-olds with different patterns of movement-attention coupling. In suppressors, the typical decrease in…

A neural model is developed to explain how humans can approach a goal object on foot while steering around obstacles to avoid collisions in a cluttered environment. The model uses optic flow from a 3-dimensional virtual reality environment to determine the position of objects on the basis of motion discontinuities and computes heading direction,…

When we move to music we feel the beat, and this feeling can shape the sound we hear. Previous studies have shown that when people listen to a metrically ambiguous rhythm pattern, moving the body on a certain beat-adults, by actively bouncing themselves in synchrony with the experimenter, and babies, by being bounced passively in the…

Do 14- to 17-month-olds notice the paths and manners of motion events? English- and Spanish-learning infants were habituated to an animated motion event including a manner (e.g., spinning) and a path (e.g., over). They were then tested on four types of events that changed either the manner, the path, both, or neither component. Both English- and…

In two studies, we investigated infants' preference for infant-directed (ID) action or "motionese" (Brand, Baldwin & Ashburn, 2002) relative to adult-directed (AD) action. In Study 1, full-featured videos were shown to 32 6- to 8-month-olds, who demonstrated a strong preference for ID action. In Study 2, infants at 6-8 months (n= 28) and 11-13…

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…

Phillips-Silver and Trainor (Phillips-Silver, J., Trainor, L.J., (2005). Feeling the beat: movement influences infants' rhythm perception. "Science", 308, 1430) demonstrated an early cross-modal interaction between body movement and auditory encoding of musical rhythm in infants. Here we show that the way adults move their bodies to music…