The most common behavioral technique used to study infant perception, cognition, language, and social development is some variant of looking time. Since its inception as a reliable method in the late 1950s, a tremendous increase in knowledge about infant competencies has been gained by inferences made from measures of looking time. Here we examine…

Investigated 4- and 7-month-olds' perception of transparency, using computer-generated achromatic or color displays depicting a semitransparent box occluding the center of a rod. Found that 4-month-olds indicated perception of transparency in color but not in achromatic displays. Seven-month-olds showed some evidence of transparency perception in…

Two experiments examined the effects of common motion, background texture, and orientation on four-month olds' perception of unity of a partially occluded rod. Results indicated that infants' perception of object unity is not dependent on a single visual cue but on a variety of cues including motion, interposition, depth cues, background texture,…

Examined infants' tendency, from a few days to nine months of age, to prefer infant-directed over adult-directed speech. Results suggest that exaggerated pitch contours that characterize infant-directed speech may become salient communicative signals for infants through language-rich, interactive experiences with caretakers and increased…

Examined perception of object unity in partial occlusion in 72 infants. Recorded how long subjects looked at a display of complete and incomplete rods. In test and control conditions, infants looked longer at broken rods than at complete rods, suggesting that infants' cognitive, visual, or attentional skills may be insufficient to support…