This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

Infants' ability to perform visual short-term memory (VSTM) tasks develops rapidly between 6 and 8 months. Here we tested the hypothesis that infants' VSTM performance is influenced by their ability to individuate simultaneously presented objects. We used a "one-shot change detection task" to ask whether 6-month-old infants (N = 47)…

The visual context in which an object or face resides can provide useful top-down information for guiding attention orienting, object recognition, and visual search. Although infants have demonstrated sensitivity to covariation in spatial arrays, it is presently unclear whether they can use rapidly acquired contextual knowledge to guide attention…

Bilingual infants from 6- to 24-months of age are more likely to generalize, flexibly reproducing actions on novel objects significantly more often than age-matched monolingual infants are. In the current study, we examine whether the addition of novel verbal labels enhances memory generalization in a perceptually complex imitation task. We…

Numbers are represented as ordered magnitudes along a spatially oriented number line. While culture and formal education modulate the direction of this number-space mapping, it is a matter of debate whether its emergence is entirely driven by cultural experience. By registering 8-9-month-old infants' eye movements, this study shows that numerical…

Recent studies suggest that infants' audiovisual speech perception is influenced by articulatory experience (Mugitani et al., 2008; Yeung & Werker, 2013). The current study extends these findings by testing if infants' emerging ability to produce native sounds in babbling impacts their audiovisual speech perception. We tested 44 6-month-olds…

The infant brain may be predisposed to identify perceptually salient cues that are common to both signed and spoken languages. Recent theory based on spoken languages has advanced sonority as one of these potential language acquisition cues. Using a preferential looking paradigm with an infrared eye tracker, we explored visual attention of hearing…

The concept of spreading activation describes how retrieval of one memory cues retrieval of other memories that are associated with it. This study explored spreading activation in 6-, 12-, and 18-month-old infants. Infants (n = 144) learned two tasks within the same experimental session; one task, deferred imitation (DI), is typically remembered…

With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6- and 8-month-olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue-reward…

Visual attention is one of the infant's primary tools for gathering relevant information from the environment for further processing and learning. The space-based component of visual attention in infants has been widely investigated; however, the object-based component of visual attention has received scarce interest. This scarcity is…

Two experiments examined the hypothesis that developing visual attentional mechanisms influence infants' Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM) in the context of multiple items. Five- and 10-month-old infants (N = 76) received a change detection task in which arrays of three differently colored squares appeared and disappeared. On each trial one square…

Integrating the multisensory features of talking faces is critical to learning and extracting coherent meaning from social signals. While we know much about the development of these capacities at the behavioral level, we know very little about the underlying neural processes. One prominent behavioral milestone of these capacities is the perceptual…

An abundance of experience with own-race faces and limited to no experience with other-race faces has been associated with better recognition memory for own-race faces in infants, children, and adults. This study investigated the developmental origins of this other-race effect (ORE) by examining the role of a salient perceptual property of…

Faces convey many signals (i.e., gaze or expressions) essential for interpersonal interaction. We have previously shown that facial expressions of emotion and gaze direction are processed and integrated in specific combinations early in life. These findings open a number of developmental questions and specifically in this paper we address whether…

The aim of this study was to examine the combined influences of infants' attention and use of social cues in the prediction of their language outcomes. This longitudinal study measured infants' visual attention on a distractibility task (11 months), joint attention (14 months), and language outcomes (word-object association, 14 months; MBCDI…