An ability to detect the common location of multisensory stimulation is essential for us to perceive a coherent environment, to represent the interface between the body and the external world, and to act on sensory information. Regarding the tactile environment "at hand", we need to represent somatosensory stimuli impinging on the skin…

Perceptual narrowing occurs in human infants for other-race faces. A paired-comparison task measuring infant looking time was used to investigate the hypothesis that adding emotional expressiveness to other-race faces would help infants break through narrowing and reinstate other-race face recognition. Experiment 1 demonstrated narrowing for White…

This study investigated transfer effects of gaze-interactive attention training to more complex social and cognitive skills in infancy. Seventy 9-month-olds were assigned to a training group (n = 35) or an active control group (n = 35). Before, after, and at 6-week follow-up both groups completed an assessment battery assessing transfer to…

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…

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure,…

Compares monocular depth perception with binocular depth perception in five- to seven-month-old infants. Reaching preferences (dependent measure) observed in the monocular condition indicated sensitivity to monocular depth information. Binocular viewing resulted in a far more consistent tendency to reach for the nearer object. (Author)

Adults' ability to track a moving target was examined in two experiments in order to compare their performance with that of very young infants. Results indicated that (1) adults'"overshoot" errors resembled those reported for young infants; and (2) adults had problems tracking a moving target which unexpectedly changed direction. (Author/DB)

Four groups of 18 adult listeners rated the tape-recorded cries of low- and high-risk infants on four Likert-type scale items. Results indicate that within-group methods of cry presentation accentuate the perceptual distance among cry types and may actually create many reliable differences that would not be found in between-group comparisons.…

Used a modified visual-fixation-based auditory-preference procedure to test preferences for infant-directed singing versus adult-directed singing in 15 two-day-old hearing infants of deaf parents. Subjects heard a Japanese and an English play song. Found that infants prefer infant-directed singing over adult-directed singing and that the…

Three experiments investigated whether 4-month-olds would attend to and utilize the global configuration ("good form") of a partly occluded, moving object to perceive its unit and coherence behind the occluder. Results indicated that curvature per se provided information in support of completion, in addition to global configuration and…

Investigated 4- and 7-month-olds' perception of transparency, using computer-generated achromatic or color displays depicting a semitransparent box occluding the center of a rod. Found that 4-month-olds indicated perception of transparency in color but not in achromatic displays. Seven-month-olds showed some evidence of transparency perception in…

Used event-related potentials to novel and primed upright and inverted faces to examine evidence of repetition priming in 6-month-olds. Found that repeated faces demonstrated greater negativity than novel faces, and upright faces demonstrated greater negativity than inverted faces. Comparisons with adults tested in a similar experiment support the…

Videotapes were made of the prehensile activity and looking behavior of 2- and 5-month-old infants in the presence of objects placed within and beyond possible contact distance. (BRT)

Two experiments examined 8-month-olds' use of absolute and relative pitch cues in a tone-sequence statistical learning task. Results suggest that, given unsegmented stimuli that do not conform to rules of musical composition, infants are more likely to track patterns of absolute pitches than of relative pitches. A third experiment found that adult…