Efficient attention control is fundamental for infant cognitive development, but its early precursors are not well understood. This study investigated whether dyadic visual attention during parent-infant interactions at 5 months of age predicts the ability to control attention at 11 months of age (N = 55). Total duration of mutual gaze (MG) was…

Over the last 2 centuries there has been a rapid increase in the proportion of children who grow up in cities. However, relatively little work has explored in detail the physiological and cognitive pathways through which city life may affect early development. To assess this, we observed a cohort of infants growing up in diverse settings across…

Infants' representations of physical events are surprisingly flexible. Brief exposure to one event can immediately enhance infants' representations of another event. The present experiments tested two potential mechanisms underlying this priming: enhanced encoding or improved retrieval. Five-month-olds saw a target block become hidden inside a…

Background: Impairment in initiating joint attention (IJA) is associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children, although it is unclear when impairments arise. Due to the early development of IJA use and late diagnosis of ASD, groups at high-risk of ASD, such as infants with an older sibling with ASD (ASIBs) and infants with fragile X…

Both early childhood maternal language input and the quality of classroom instruction in elementary school have been shown to be important environmental supports in predicting children's literacy skill development. However, no studies have simultaneously examined these two environmental supports in relation to children's early language skills and…

We apply a biopsychosocial conceptualization to attention development in the 1st year and examine the role of neurophysiological and social processes on the development of early attention processes. We tested whether maternal behavior measured during 2 mother-child interaction tasks when infants (N = 388) were 5 months predicted infant medial…

How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment…

Sixty infants divided evenly between 5 and 7 months of age were tested for their knowledge of object continuity versus discontinuity with a predictive tracking task. The stimulus event consisted of a moving ball that was briefly occluded for 20 trials. Both age groups predictively tracked the ball when it disappeared and reappeared via occlusion,…

Early selective attention skills are a crucial building block for cognitive development, as attention orienting serves as a primary means by which infants interact with and learn from the environment. Although several studies have examined infants' attention orienting using the spatial cueing task, relatively few studies have examined…

Research on early physical reasoning has shown surprising discontinuities in developmental trajectories. Infants possess some skills that seem to disappear and then re-emerge in childhood. It has been suggested that prediction skills required in search tasks might cause these discontinuities (Keen, 2003). We tested 3.5- to 5-year-olds'…

Eye tracking was used to show that 18-month-old infants are sensitive to social context as a sign that others' actions are bound together as a collaborative sequence based on a joint goal. Infants observed five identical demonstrations in which Actor 1 moved a block to one location and Actor 2 moved the same block to a new location, creating…

The elicited-response false belief task has traditionally been considered as reliably indicating that children acquire an understanding of false belief around 4 years of age. However, recent investigations using spontaneous-response tasks suggest that false belief understanding emerges much earlier. This leads to a developmental paradox: if young…

Warning others is a paradigm case of communicative helping and prospective action understanding. The current study addressed the ontogeny of warning in infants' gestural communication. We found that 12- and 18-month-olds ("n" = 84) spontaneously warned an adult by pointing out to her an aversive object hidden in her way…

This study investigates the importance of object function (action-object-outcome relations) on object individuation in infancy. Five experiments examined the ability of 9.5- and 12-month-old infants to individuate simple geometric objects in a manual search design. Experiments 1 through 4 (12-month-olds, N = 128) provided several combinations of…

Two experiments (N=136) studied how 4- to 6-month-olds perceive a simple schematic event, seen as goal-directed action and reaction from 3 years of age. In our causal reaction event, a red square moved toward a blue square, stopping prior to contact. Blue began to move away before red stopped, so that both briefly moved simultaneously at a…