A remarkable amount of perceptual development occurs in the first year after birth. In this article, we spotlight the case of color perception. We outline how within just 6 months, infants go from very limited detection of color as newborns to a more sophisticated perception of color that enables them to make sense of objects and the world around…

Recent evidence suggests that adults selectively attend to features of action, such as how a hand contacts an object, and less to configural properties of action, such as spatial trajectory, when observing human actions. The current research investigated whether this bias develops in infancy. We utilized a habituation paradigm to assess…

Two experiments examined the effects of multimodal presentation and stimulus familiarity on auditory and visual processing. In Experiment 1, 10-month-olds were habituated to either an auditory stimulus, a visual stimulus, or an auditory-visual multimodal stimulus. Processing time was assessed during the habituation phase, and discrimination of…

To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital-temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear)…

In 4 studies, 7.5-month-olds used synchronized visua-lauditory correlations to separate a target speech stream when a distractor passage was presented at equal loudness. Infants succeeded in a segmentation task (using the head-turn preference procedure with video familiarization) when a video of the talker's face was synchronized with the target…

Are abstract representations of number--representations that are independent of the particular type of entities that are enumerated--a product of human language or culture, or do they trace back to human infancy? To address this question, four experiments investigated whether human infants discriminate between sequences of actions (jumps of a…

Like adults, young infants prefer attractive to unattractive faces (e.g. Langlois, Roggman, Casey, Ritter, Rieser-Danner & Jenkins, 1987; Slater, von der Schulenburg, Brown, Badenoch, Butterworth, Parsons & Samuels, 1998). Older children and adults stereotype based on facial attractiveness (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani & Longo, 1991; Langlois,…