Combined with emotional expressions, eye gaze can provide essential information to indicate threat in the environment. The current study assessed the effects of eye gaze direction on infants' neural processing of fearful and angry faces. Event-related potentials were recorded from thirteen 7-month-old infants. Two face-sensitive posterior…

In the absence of a neurological or genetic marker to aid in the early diagnosis of autism, clinicians can use infant behaviors and parental responses during the child's first year of life to determine the child's risk of an autistic disorder. The author presents 12 questions for clinicians to ask parents about their child's early development. An…

Objective: Formula-fed infants gain weight faster than breastfed infants. This study evaluated whether encouraging formula-feeding caregivers to be sensitive to infant satiety cues would alter feeding practices and reduce infant formula intake and weight gain. Design: Double-blind, randomized educational intervention, with intake and growth…

This study analyzed the increase in head circumference (HC) of 85 autistic infants (64 boys and 21 girls) during their first year of life. The data were collected from their "mother-and-baby" notebooks. This notebook is a medical record of the baby's growth and development delivered to the parents of all babies born in Japan. This is a…

Purpose: According to the frames then content (f/c) hypothesis (P. F. MacNeilage & B. L. Davis, 1990), the internal structure of syllables with consonant plus vowel structure (CV) during canonical babbling is determined primarily by production system properties related to rhythmic mandibular oscillations ("motor frames"). The purpose of this study…

This article addresses the issue of whether the remember-know (RK) task is best explained by a single-process or a dual-process model. All single-process models propose that remember and know responses reflect different levels of a single strength-of-evidence dimension. Thus, across conditions in which response criteria are held constant, these…

Adolescence is a time of social and cognitive development associated with changes in brain structure and function. These developmental changes may show an altered path in individuals born before 33 weeks' gestation (very preterm; VPT). The cerebellum is affected by VPT birth, but no studies have yet assessed the adolescent development of this…

Two experiments investigated infants' ability to localize tactile sensations in peripersonal space. Infants aged 10 months (Experiment 1) and 6.5 months (Experiment 2) were presented with vibrotactile stimuli unpredictably to either hand while they adopted either a crossed- or uncrossed-hands posture. At 6.5 months, infants' responses were…

This study was conducted to explore the contribution of attentional skills to early language, and the influence of early language markers on the development of attention, simultaneously examining the impact of parent-child interaction factors (reciprocity/synchrony and sensitivity/responsivity), including their potential moderator effects. All…

The National Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center (NECTAC) Technical Assistance (TA) Model for Long-Term Systems Change (LTSC) is grounded in conceptual frameworks in the literature on systems change and systems thinking. The NECTAC conceptual framework uses a logic model approach to change developed specifically for states' infant and…

Background: Parent report instruments are frequently used for the identification of both "at-risk" children and to support the diagnosis of communication delay. Whilst the evidence is strong for the accuracy of parent report of vocabulary between 2 and 3 years, there are fewer studies that have considered the ability of parents to report…

Problem Based Learning (PBL) makes use of real-life scenarios to stimulate students' prior knowledge and to provide a meaningful context that is also related to the student's future professional work. In this article, Paternity testing is presented using a PBL approach that involves a combination of classroom, laboratory, and out-of-class…

This research focused on the observation of infants between the ages of 2 and 18 months with regard to their aesthetic preferences for a variety of visual stimuli. These stimuli included: a black-and-white schematic drawing of a baby, a popular cartoon image, a colorful abstract painting of a baby, and a photographic image of a baby's face. Prior…

Episodes of crying with higher fundamental frequency (f0) are perceived as more aversive and distressful than lower frequency cries. Besides, previous studies have speculated that in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) higher f0 may account for evoking mental states of uneasiness in the caregiver. Moreover no evidence on developmental…

We present a neurocomputational model with self-organizing maps that accounts for the emergence of taxonomic responding and fast mapping in early word learning, as well as a rapid increase in the rate of acquisition of words observed in late infancy. The quality and efficiency of generalization of word-object associations is directly related to…