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…

Infants are sensitive to biological motion, but do they recognize it as animate? As a first step towards answering this question, two experiments investigated whether 6-month-olds selectively attribute goals to shapes moving like animals. We habituated infants to a square moving towards one of two targets. When target locations were switched,…

Two experiments investigated the role of continuity cues in infants' perception of launching events as causal. Results indicated that younger subjects' perceptions of the particular object may influence perception of causality and that infants' use of cues to causality changes with age. (WP)

Examines developmental change in 4- 7- and 10-month-old infants' perceptions of correlations among attributes to determine whether relational information plays a role in abilities ranging from the perception and recognition of a simple pattern to the formation of a category. (HOD)