Reviews literature on music perception and cognition in the first year of life and examines their contribution to domains such as child development and music education. Focuses on studies examining musical features and the uses of music in the everyday life of infants and their caretakers. Critiques previous and current literature. Discusses…

Four studies examined whether 16-month-olds' responses to true/false utterances interacted with their knowledge of human agents. Findings suggested that infants are developing a critical conception of human speakers as truthful communicators and that infants understand that human speakers may provide uniquely useful information when a word fails…

Three experiments investigated discrimination and memory of 5.5-month-olds for videotapes of women performing different activities (blowing bubbles, brushing hair, brushing teeth) or static displays after a 1-minute and a 7-week delay. Findings demonstrate the attentional salience of actions over faces in dynamic events to 5.5-month-olds. Findings…

Indicated that infants with different degrees of brain insult display different degrees of abnormalities. The grouping of infants by documented brain insult provides better differentiation of infants than grouping by birth weight. (RH)

Examines strategies for studying individual differences in infant behavior from the standpoints of the distinction between individual differences and developmental function and the need to study change with multivariate techniques. These themes are applied to the study of mental development, behavior genetics, temperament, and attachment. (RJC)

Reviews research on the functioning of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical system in normal infants. Special attention is paid to the environmental stimuli and psychological processes regulating the stress responses of this system. (NH)

Explores the relations between parent gazing and touching and infant gazing on the part of boys, girls, mothers, and fathers. Patterns of early parent-infant social play behaviors appear to differ with both infant and parent gender. (Author/BB)

Reflecting on obsessional play objects of infants, Hodgkin suggests that a proper understanding of these "transitional" or "cognitive" objects could lead to an educational model of a "learner" involving a number of human competencies, all developing synergistically. Contends that such a model may be truer to life than…

Investigated developmental change and patterns of individual differences in dimensions of infant temperament. Rothbart Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ) was completed for subjects 5 times between 6 weeks and 30 months of age. Interpretable age changes were found for emotional reactivity, but not for the index of regulation (IBQ soothability).…

Using a new temperament inventory (the Japanese Temperament Questionnaire) developed from the free responses of Japanese mothers asked to describe their infants' behavioral styles, 469 mothers rated behaviors observed in their 1-, 3-, or 6-month-old baby. Results suggest that mothers' perceptions of infant temperament are both pancultural and…

Studied the organization of arousal and attention processes in 138 neurologically at-risk neonates by examining visual preferences when infants were in 3 arousal conditions that involved light panel stimuli. There were no differences in preferences in the two conditions that caused the most arousal. (LB)

Measured 5- and 12-month-old Japanese and U.S. infants' responses to an arm restraint procedure. Found that older infants exhibited shorter response latencies and produced more negative facial expressions than did younger infants. Among five month olds, U.S. infants produced negative facial expressions more quickly than did Japanese infants. (BC)

Considers contributions of Sigmund Freud and Rene Spitz to developmental psychology. Freud's contributions include his observations about play, perspectives on developmental processes, and ideas about unconscious mental activity. Spitz's contributions include his assessments of infants, perspectives on developmental processes, and his concept of…

During observed interactions between mothers and infants in New York, Paris, and Tokyo, mothers responded to infants' exploration of the environment with encouragement, infants' vocalized nondistress with imitation, and infants' distress with nurturance. Cultural differences in maternal responsiveness to infant looking behavior were found. (BC)

Explores the recorded remarks of one infant female child related to children's books. Contrasts the "fantastic" statements spontaneously generated by the child with the ways in which she responded to animism and other "fantastic" conventions in picture books heard by her at the same ages. (HB)