We examined the home-based concerns reported by mothers of infant siblings of children with autism across the first year of life. At all three ages measured, mothers of high-risk infants were significantly more likely than mothers of low-risk infants to report language, social communication, and restricted and repetitive behavior concerns but were…

Faces convey important information about the social environment, and even very young infants are preferentially attentive to face-like over non-face stimuli. Eye-tracking studies have allowed researchers to examine which features of faces infants find most salient across development, and the present study examined scanning of familiar (i.e.,…

Infants' responses to male and female faces and their preferences for happy versus fearful faces were studied to extend findings indicating that infants at 7 months can generalize discrimination between expressions of happiness and surprise across four different female models' faces. In the first experiment, a paired-comparison procedure was used…

Examined seven-month-old infants' perceptions of happy and fearful facial expressions. Infants could generalize discrimination of expressions across male and female faces if first familiarized with happy faces. Infants tended to look longer at fear faces than at happy faces. Preferential responding was not specific to any individual face.…

Three experiments investigated seven-month-old infants' ability to discriminate the facial expressions of happiness and fear. (CM)

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…

Two studies used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine neural manifestations of emotion recognition in 7-month-old infants. In the first study, 20 infants were presented with 2 alternating achromatic slides of the same female model posing a happy and a fearful expression. Infants' ERPs revealed a prominent positive component to the happy face…

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…

Used event-related potentials (ERPs) and fixation duration to examine infants' responses to events. Found that ERPs, but not looking time, distinguished between familiar events presented frequently rather than infrequently, and between familiar and novel events presented infrequently. Proposed that ERPs reflected updating of working memory or…