This study investigated how infants perceive and interpret human body movement. We recorded the eye movements and pupil sizes of 9- and 12-month-old infants and of adults (N = 14 per group) as they observed animation clips of biomechanically possible and impossible arm movements performed by a human and by a humanoid robot. Both 12-month-old…

Adults vary their haptic exploratory behavior reliably with variation both in the sensory input and in the task goals. Little is known about the development of these connections between perceptual goals and exploratory behaviors. A total of 36 children ages 3, 4, and 5 years and 20 adults completed a haptic intramodal match-to-sample task.…

Two experiments examined the effects of multimodal presentation and stimulus familiarity on auditory and visual processing. In Experiment 1, 10-month-olds were habituated to either an auditory stimulus, a visual stimulus, or an auditory-visual multimodal stimulus. Processing time was assessed during the habituation phase, and discrimination of…

Supplementary stimulation was supplied for 30 minutes per day for approximately six weeks to 156 normal, full-term institutionalized infants prior to adoption. The Gesell Developmental Schedules were administered regularly (until age 27 months), to determine whether development had been enhanced by the treatment. (JMB)

A dimmer light condition was found to affect the respiration rate of 10 newborns in an experiment investigating the effects of sound and light intensity. (WY)

Analyzed postural oscillations in six-, eight-, and 10-year-olds in four visual and two somatosensory conditions. Found that children were more stable with than without vision and more stable with a normal than with an altered support surface. Overall, there was no effect of age. The relative influence of peripheral and central vision on postural…

Cardiac response to stimulation of the left and right perioral region in infants was examined. Cardiac acceleration and ipsilateral head turning occurred more reliably to stimulation of the infant's right side than to stimulation of the left side. Results reflect a difference in sensitivity at the infant's two sides. (SDH)

Investigated 7-month olds' ability to relate vowel sounds with objects when intersensory redundancy was present versus absent. Found that infants detected a mismatch in the vowel-object pairs in the moving-synchronous condition but not in the still or moving-asynchronous condition, demonstrating that temporal synchrony between vocalizations and…

This experiment assessed the reinforcing properties of sensory stimulation for autistic children using three different types of sensory stimulation: music, visual flickering, and visual movement. (SB)

Describes two experiments that examined whether the amplitude of the human eyeblink by a mild tap between the eyebrows can be increased if a brief tone is presented simultaneously with the tap and how these effects change from newborn infants to adults. (HOD)

Infants of five, seven, and nine months were shown two video images on monitors placed side by side. Images were accompanied by a soundtrack that matched one of the images. Results indicated that age-related changes in infants' coordination of auditory and visual depth information took place between the ages of five and nine months. (SH)

Discusses changes occurring in two-, four-, and six-month-old infants' visual attention span, through a series of experiments examining their ability to orient to peripheral visual stimuli. The results obtained were consistent with the hypothesis that infants get faster with age in shifting attention to a spatial location. (AA)