Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show atypical processing of facial expressions. Research with autistic toddlers suggests that abnormalities in processing of spatial frequencies (SFs) contribute to such differences. The current event-related-potential (ERP) study investigated differences between 10-month-old infants with high- and…

Infants' perception of faces becomes attuned to the environment during the first year of life. However, the mechanisms that underpin perceptual narrowing for faces are only poorly understood. Considering the developmental similarities seen in perceptual narrowing for faces and speech and the role that statistical learning has been shown to play…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were utilized in an investigation of 21 six-month-olds' attention to and processing of global and local properties of hierarchical patterns. Overall, infants demonstrated an advantage for processing the overall configuration (i.e., global properties) of local features of hierarchical patterns; however,…

The effects of individual versus category training, using behavioral indices of stimulus discrimination and neural ERPs indices of holistic processing, were examined in infants. Following pretraining assessments at 6 months, infants were sent home with training books of objects for 3 months. One group of infants was trained with six different…

Episodic memories for autobiographical events that happen in unique spatiotemporal contexts are central to defining who we are. Yet, before 2 years of age, children are unable to form or store episodic memories for recall later in life, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. Here, we studied the development of allocentric spatial memory, a…

Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not…

Infants start to interpret completed human actions as goal-directed in the second half of the first year of life. In a series of three studies, the understanding of a goal-directed but uncompleted action was investigated in 6- and 9-month-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm. Infants saw the video of an actor's reaching movement…

Sensitivity to shape changes was measured, in particular detection of convexity and concavity changes. The available data are contradictory. The author used a change detection task and simple polygons to systematically manipulate convexity/concavity. Performance was high for detecting a change of sign (a new concave vertex along a convex contour…

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)…

Three-month-olds are sensitive to orientation changes of line drawings when they have a three-dimensional (3-D) interpretation and when the changes are defined by both 3-D depth and two-dimensional (2-D) picture plane cues [Bhatt, R. S., & Bertin, E. (2001). Pictorial cues and three-dimensional information processing in early infancy. Journal of…

Results suggest that when the internal element of a compound stimulus is a highly preferred or salient stimulus, young infants will process information about its characteristics. (Author/DB)

Previous research suggests that model competence does not emerge until relatively late in infancy (20-26 months). Development was systematically analyzed within 3 key areas--count noun learning, dual representation, and categorization--hypothesized to support the emergence of model competence in the second year. In an object-handling preferential…

Several propositions deduced from the discrepancy hypothesis were tested with four-month-old infants using random shapes in a habituation/discrepancy paradigm. (JMB)

Three studies investigated whether eye gaze cueing in 4-month-old infants is the result of a domain-specific module or reflects the activity of domain-general processes. In two of three experiments, infants perceived apparent motion of the pupils, and this directly elicited saccades, but only when this motion was preceded by a period of direct…

Developmental studies of face processing have revealed age-related changes in how infants allocate neurophysiological resources to the face of a caregiver and an unfamiliar adult. We hypothesize that developmental changes in how infants interact with their caregiver are related to the changes in brain response. We studied 6-month-olds because this…