Faces are visually attractive to both human and nonhuman primates. Human neonates are thought to have a broad template for faces at birth and prefer face-like to non-face-like stimuli. To better compare developmental trajectories of face processing phylogenetically, here, we investigated preferences for face-like stimuli in infant rhesus macaques…

Stimulus overselectivity is widely accepted as a stimulus control abnormality in autism spectrum disorders and subsets of other populations. Previous research has demonstrated a link between both chronological and mental age and overselectivity in typical development. However, the age at which children are developmentally ready to respond to…

No evidence had been provided so far of newborns' capacity to give a matching response to 2D stimuli. We report evidence from 18 newborns who were presented with three types of stimuli on a 2D screen. The stimuli were video-recorded displays of tongue protrusion shown by: (a) a human face, (b) a human tongue from a disembodied mouth, and (c) an…

In 2 experiments, the interplay of action perception and action production was investigated in 6-month-old infants. In Experiment 1, infants received 2 versions of a means-end task in counterbalanced order. In the action perception version, a preferential looking paradigm in which infants were shown an actor performing means-end behavior with an…

Five experiments examined 79 newborns' ability to discriminate and categorize a spatial relation, defined by the left-right spatial position of a blinking object-target with respect to a vertical landmark-bar. Three-day-old infants discriminated the up versus low position of an object located on the same side of the landmark-bar (Experiment 1) and…

Previous studies have shown that as a group 6-month-old infants successfully discriminate numerical changes when the values differ by at least a 1:2 ratio but fail at a 2:3 ratio (e.g. 8 vs. 16 but not 8 vs. 12). However, no studies have yet examined individual differences in number discrimination in infancy. Using a novel numerical change…

Infants start to interpret completed human actions as goal-directed in the second half of the first year of life. In a series of three studies, the understanding of a goal-directed but uncompleted action was investigated in 6- and 9-month-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm. Infants saw the video of an actor's reaching movement…

Purpose: This research examined how the color distribution of symbols within a visual aided augmentative and alternative communication array influenced the speed and accuracy with which participants with and without Down syndrome located a target picture symbol. Method: Eight typically developing children below the age of 4 years, 8 typically…

In this study, we investigated relations between infants' understanding of intentional actions and measures of social responsiveness during a transitional period, 9- to 11-months. Infants (N = 52) were tested in visual habituation paradigms tapping their understanding of the relation between a person and the object of her attention. Measures of…

In 4 studies, 7.5-month-olds used synchronized visua-lauditory correlations to separate a target speech stream when a distractor passage was presented at equal loudness. Infants succeeded in a segmentation task (using the head-turn preference procedure with video familiarization) when a video of the talker's face was synchronized with the target…

Presents results of two experiments which measured contrast sensitivity function in infants. Information concerning development of visual acuity, low frequency attenuation, and sensitivity to contrast were collected. Results provide an approximate picture of and means for detection of infants' pattern information. (Author/DB)

Are abstract representations of number--representations that are independent of the particular type of entities that are enumerated--a product of human language or culture, or do they trace back to human infancy? To address this question, four experiments investigated whether human infants discriminate between sequences of actions (jumps of a…

Based on PhD thesis submitted to Brown University (June 1967).

Existing data indicate that newborns are able to recognize individual faces, but little is known about what perceptual cues drive this ability. The current study showed that either the inner or outer features of the face can act as sufficient cues for newborns' face recognition (Experiment 1), but the outer part of the face enjoys an advantage…