As humans, we are attuned to the moods and emotions of others. This understanding of emotions enables us to interpret other people's actions on the basis of their emotional displays. However, the development of this capacity is not well understood. Here we show a developmental pattern in 10- and 14-month-old infants' sensitivity to others'…

In this study, we addressed the question of the nature of the information needed by 13-month-old infants to understand another agent's intentions. In two experiments, an experimenter was either unable or unwilling to give a toy to an infant. Importantly, an implement (a gutter in which the toy could roll down toward the infant) was used to make…

Although working memory has a highly constrained capacity limit of three or four items, both adults and toddlers can increase the total amount of stored information by "chunking" object representations in memory. To examine the developmental origins of chunking, we used a violation-of-expectation procedure to ask whether 7-month-old infants, whose…

Can infants use interposition and line junction cues to infer three-dimensional (3D) structure? Previous work has shown that in a task that required 4-month-olds to discriminate between static two-dimensional (2D) pictures of possible and impossible cubes, infants exhibited a spontaneous preference for displays of the impossible cube but left open…

Results suggest that temporal summation of brief stimuli is deficient in neonates. When compared with adult data from an analogous study, results also suggest that the transient system is immature in infants and that this immaturity is expressed in different ways by startle amplitude, probability, and latency. (PCB)

Two experiments, involving a total of 12 subjects, demonstrated the role of adults as releasers of infant vocal sounds, indicating that both rate and percent of bursts of vocal sounds are increased by adult stimulation. Both response-dependent and response-independent social stimulation were effective when infants could see the adult's eyes. (GO)

Investigated changes in non-nutritive sucking behavior of premature infants when light stimulation was presented. Results generally support past evidence that premature infants are capable of making orienting and discriminative responses to visual stimuli and chronological age effects were indicated. (DP)

The tracking behavior of Infants up to 5 months of age was studied using linear and circular trajectories, with partial occlusion of the trajectories. Results indicate that it is not until the age of about 16 weeks that infants can be said to be tracking a moving object as an object. (Author/WY)

Tests the hypothesis that infants may learn to respond to cues which consistently specify the ultimate location of an object which is displaced while invisible. Subjects were 96 nine-month-old infants. (MP)

Five experiments using identical reflex modification procedures on neonates and adults suggest developmental differences in processing auditory stimuli. Neonates failed to exhibit reflex inhibition by either prior acoustic or tactile stimuli. Adults exhibited robust reflex inhibition to these same stimuli. Developmental processes implied by these…

To determine whether heart rate increase can be attributed to increased sucking amplitude for sweeter fluids, sucking and heart rate of 20 full-term infants were studied. (MP)

The analysis of I-scale preference orders of 71 infants (2 to 9 months old) to four face-like stimuli suggested a common J-scale stimulus ordering for each of four age groups. Changes in I-scale frequencies were used as a measure of age-related changes in preference orders. (MS)

Two experiments investigated the role of distractor characteristics and type of object-directed attention on 7- and 10-month-old infants' distraction latencies during object exploration. Found that infants took longer to turn toward distractors during focused object-directed attention than when engaged in more casual attention. They exhibited…