When teaching infants new actions, parents tend to modify their movements. Infants prefer these infant-directed actions (IDAs) over adult-directed actions and learn well from them. Yet, it remains unclear "how" parents' action modulations capture infants' attention. Typically, making movements larger than usual is thought to draw…

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…

This study explores how 7-month-old infants categorize graphical images varying in basic perceptual features by using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) task. Most participants were Caucasian and their parents had a higher education, but the family's socioeconomic background was mixed. Experiment 1 (N = 23) tested brain responses to…

Electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry has been widely studied across the lifespan, with multiple studies conducted in infancy. However, few have investigated frontal EEG asymmetry in the context of emotional-eliciting tasks, controlling for baseline to focus on an experimental episode response. The present study was designed to address this gap in…

Behavioral research has shown that 12- but not 9-month-olds imitate an unusual and inefficient action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) more when the model's hands are free. Rational-imitation accounts suggest that infants evaluate actions based on the rationality principle, that is, they expect people to choose efficient means to achieve a…

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…

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…

Since their discovery in the early 1990s, mirror neurons have been proposed to be related to many social-communicative abilities, such as imitation. However, research into the early manifestations of the putative neural mirroring system and its role in early social development is still inconclusive. In the current EEG study, mu suppression,…

The current study examines the processing of upright and inverted faces in 3-year-old children (n = 35). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a passive looking paradigm including adult and newborn face stimuli. We observed three face-sensitive components, the P1, the N170 and the P400. Inverted faces elicited shorter P1 latency and…

Visual perceptual learning (PL) and perceptual expertise (PE) traditionally lead to different training effects and recruit different brain areas, but reasons for these differences are largely unknown. Here, we tested how the learning history influences visual object representations. Two groups were trained with tasks typically used in PL or PE…

Our aim was to investigate whether developing language system, as measured by a priming task for spoken words, is organized by semantic categories. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a priming task for spoken words in 18- and 24-month-old monolingual French learning children. Spoken word pairs were either semantically related…

The expertise of adults in face perception is facilitated by their ability to rapidly detect that a stimulus is a face. In two experiments, we examined the role of early visual input in the development of face detection by testing patients who had been treated as infants for bilateral congenital cataract. Experiment 1 indicated that, at age 9 to…

We recorded electroencephalogram (EEG; 6-9 Hz) and heart rate (HR) from infants at 5 and 10 months of age during baseline and performance on the looking A-not-B task of infant working memory (WM). Longitudinal baseline-to-task comparisons revealed WM-related increases in EEG power (all electrodes) and EEG coherence (medial frontal-occipital…

Fifty 8-month-old infants participated in a study of the interrelations among cognition, temperament, and electrophysiology. Better performance on a working memory task (assessed using a looking version of the A-not-B task) was associated with increases in frontal-parietal EEG coherence from baseline to task, as well as elevated levels of…

While numbers generally cue processing of quantity or order, they can also contain semantic information, as in the case of historic years (e.g., "1492" calls forth associations of Columbus sailing the ocean blue). Whether these dates are processed as quantities or events may depend on the context in which they occur. We examined such "ambiguous…