Infants and their mothers participated in a longitudinal study of the sequelae of infant goal-blockage responses. Four-month-old infants participated in a standard contingency learning and goal-blockage procedure during which anger and sad facial expressions to the blockage were coded. When infants were 12 and 20 months old, mothers completed a…

In five experiments, we tested segmentation of word forms from natural speech materials by 8-month-old monolingual infants who are acquiring Canadian French or Canadian English. These two languages belong to different rhythm classes; Canadian French is syllable-timed and Canada English is stress-timed. Findings of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 show that…

Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. The 2012 winner is Bob McMurray for pioneering research on speech and language processing in infants and adults. McMurray has conducted influential work on the graded nature of…

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…

Infant development plays a foundational role in optimal child development and health. Some studies have demonstrated an association between maternal psychological distress and infant outcomes, although the main emphasis has been on postpartum depression and infant-maternal attachment. Prevention and early intervention strategies would benefit from…

Developmental research is enhanced by use of multiple methodologies for examining psychological processes. The electroencephalogram (EEG) is an efficient and relatively inexpensive method for the study of developmental changes in brain-behavior relations. In this review, we highlight some of the challenges for using EEG in cognitive development…

The object of this study was to investigate whether the amygdala is involved in affective priming effect after stimuli are encoded unconsciously and consciously. During the encoding phase, each masked face (fearful or neutral) was presented to participants six times for 17 ms each, using a backward masking paradigm. During the retrieval phase,…

The ability to detect and prefer a face when embedded in complex visual displays was investigated in 3- and 6-month-old infants, as well as in adults, through a modified version of the visual search paradigm and the recording of eye movements. Participants "(N" = 43) were shown 32 visual displays that comprised a target face among 3 or 5…

Humans gather most of their knowledge about the world, including objectively true facts and specific cultural norms, by observing and being taught by others. Some individuals are worthy teachers and objects of imitation, having knowledge of cultural practices and positive intentions to inform. Others are better ignored because they are ignorant,…

Many theories of early word learning begin with the uncertainty inherent to learning a word from its co-occurrence with a visual scene. However, the relevant visual scene for infant word learning is neither from the adult theorist's view nor the mature partner's view, but is rather from the learner's personal view. Here we show that when 18-month…

This paper presents two methods that we applied to our research to record infant gaze in the context of goal-oriented actions using different eye-tracking devices: head-mounted and remote eye-tracking. For each type of eye-tracking system, we discuss their advantages and disadvantages, describe the particular experimental setups we used to study…

The significance of mind-mindedness, or the tendency of adults to ascribe mental states and processes when describing and interpreting children's behavior, is well established in home contexts. The purpose of this study was to explore the prevalence and pedagogical implications of the mind-mindedness of 24 early childhood practitioners working…

Recent advances in clinical research have made it possible to diagnosis autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as early as the second year of life. The diagnostic process early in development is often complex, and thus, familiarity with the most recent findings in clinical assessment instruments, early symptoms, and developmental trajectories of young…

This study investigated the ability of preterm infants to learn an object shape with one hand and discriminate a new shape in the opposite hand (without visual control). Twenty-four preterm infants between 33 and 34 + 6 gestational weeks received a tactile habituation task with either their right or left hand followed by a tactile discrimination…

Early language development is characterized by predictable changes in the words children produce and the complexity of their utterances. In infants, these changes could reflect increasing linguistic expertise or cognitive maturation and development. To disentangle these factors, we compared the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted…