It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal…

Object names are a major component of early vocabularies and learning object names depends on being able to visually recognize objects in the world. However, the fundamental visual challenge of the moment-to-moment variations in object appearances that learners must resolve has received little attention in word learning research. Here we provide…

This study examined the relevance of infant temperament, parent personality and parenting stress for children's socio-emotional development, looking in addition for any differences between mothers and fathers. Participants, from a community sample, were 410 mothers and fathers reporting their personality (NEO Personality Inventory), child…

This review challenges the traditional interpretation of infants' and young children's responses to three types of potentially "fear-inducing" stimuli--snakes and spiders, heights, and strangers. The traditional account is that these stimuli are the objects of infants' earliest developing fears. We present evidence against the…

To benefit from the exploration of their bodies and their physical and social environments, infants need to detect sensorimotor contingencies linking their actions to sensory feedback. This ability, which seems to be present in babies from birth and even in utero, has been widely used by researchers in their study of early development. However, a…

Eye tracking research has shown that infants develop a repertoire of attentional capacities during the first year. The majority of studies examining the early development of attention comes from Western, high-resource countries. We examined visual attention in a heterogeneous sample of infants in rural Malawi (N = 312-376, depending on analysis).…

Individual differences in infant attention are theorized to reflect the speed of information processing and are related to later cognitive abilities (i.e., memory, language, and intelligence). This study provides the first systematic longitudinal analysis of infant attention and early childhood executive function (EF; e.g., working memory,…

In this study, relations between emotional resonance responses to another's distress, emotion regulation, and self-other discrimination were investigated in infants three-, six-, and nine-months-old. We measured the emotional reactions to the pain cry of a peer, along with the ability to regulate emotions and to discriminate between self and other…

What kind of featural information do infants rely on when they are trying to recognize a previously seen object? The question of whether infants use certain features (e.g., shape or color) more than others (e.g., luminance) can only be studied legitimately if visual salience is controlled, as the magnitude of feature values--how noticeable and…

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the development of sleep-wake and melatonin diurnal rhythms over the first 3 months of life, and the potential effect of bed-sharing on their development. It was hypothesized that increased maternal contact through bed-sharing would affect the development of rhythms in human infants. Ten…

Takes an exploratory look at the relationships between (1) the various fears that develop during infancy, (2) perceptual-cognitive development and the exhibition of specific fears, and (3) individual differences in temperament and the manifestation of specific fears. This paper was presented at the Merrill-Palmer Institute Conference on Research…

Reports that, even though young infants can discriminate among different facial expressions, there are individual differences in infants' expressivity and ability to produce and discriminate facial expressions. (PCB)

Studied 112 preterm infants to determine developmental changes and stability of individual differences. Results indicate significant developmental gains with age, and highly significant individual stability of performance across age. (RJC)

Examines strategies for studying individual differences in infant behavior from the standpoints of the distinction between individual differences and developmental function and the need to study change with multivariate techniques. These themes are applied to the study of mental development, behavior genetics, temperament, and attachment. (RJC)

Investigated developmental change and patterns of individual differences in dimensions of infant temperament. Rothbart Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ) was completed for subjects 5 times between 6 weeks and 30 months of age. Interpretable age changes were found for emotional reactivity, but not for the index of regulation (IBQ soothability).…