Behavioral inhibition (BI) and maternal over-control are early risk factors for later childhood internalizing problems, particularly social anxiety disorder (SAD). Consistently high BI across childhood appears to confer risk for the onset of SAD by adolescence. However, no prior studies have prospectively examined observed maternal over-control as…

This study examined the longitudinal associations between attentional regulation in preschool and children's school success in later elementary school within an at-risk sample (N = 2595). Specifically, two facets of attention (focused attention and lack of impulsivity) at age 5 were explored as independent predictors of children's achievement and…

In response to interest from the National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorders (NPDC-ASD), National Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center (NECTAC) queried state Part C and Section 619 coordinators regarding screening measures, diagnostic instruments and procedures, and trends in identifying young children with ASD…

Concurrent with recommendations to place infants to sleep in supine, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of infants with positional plagiocephaly (PP). Recent evidence suggests that infants who have decreased exposure to prone position may have a higher incidence of PP and may be at risk for a delay in the acquisition of certain motor…

This study of infant declarative memory concurrently examined brain-electrical activity and deferred imitation performance in 10-month-old infants. Continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) measures were collected throughout the activity-matched baseline, encoding (modeling) and retrieval (delayed test) phases of a within-subjects deferred imitation…

This experiment examined invariance in object representations through measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) to pictures in a masked repetition priming paradigm. Pairs of pictures were presented where the prime was either the same size or half the size of the target object and the target was either presented in a normal orientation or was a…

We investigated whether 16-month-old infants' past experience with a person's gaze reliability influences their expectation about the person's ability to form beliefs. Infants were first administered a search task in which they observed an experimenter show excitement while looking inside a box that either contained a toy (reliable looker…

Since the experiments of Saffran et al. [Saffran, J., Aslin, R., & Newport, E. (1996). Statistical learning in 8-month-old infants. "Science," 274, 1926-1928], there has been a great deal of interest in the question of how statistical regularities in the speech stream might be used by infants to begin to identify individual words. In this work, we…

By 7 months of age, infants are able to learn rules based on the abstract relationships between stimuli ( Marcus et al., 1999 ), but they are better able to do so when exposed to speech than to some other classes of stimuli. In the current experiments we ask whether multimodal stimulus information will aid younger infants in identifying abstract…

The present research examined whether infants as young as 6 months of age would consider what objects a human agent could perceive when interpreting her actions on the objects. In two experiments, the infants took the agent's actions of repeatedly reaching for and grasping one of two possible objects as suggesting her preference for that object…

For adults, prior information about an individual's likely goals, preferences or dispositions plays a powerful role in interpreting ambiguous behavior and predicting and interpreting behavior in novel contexts. Across two studies, we investigated whether 10-month-old infants' ability to identify the goal of an ambiguous action sequence was…

The aim of this study was to measure the pattern of hand preferences for pointing gestures as a function of object-manipulation handedness in 123 infants and toddlers (10-40 months). The results showed that not only right-handers but also left-handers and ambidextrous participants tended to use their right hand for pointing. There was a…

Numerous recent studies suggest that human learners, including both infants and adults, readily track sequential statistics computed between adjacent elements. One such statistic, transitional probability, is typically calculated as the likelihood that one element predicts another. However, little is known about whether listeners are sensitive to…

Infant's face preferences have previously been assessed in displays containing 1 or 2 faces. Here we present 6-month-old infants with a complex visual array containing faces among multiple visual objects. Despite the competing objects, infants direct their first saccade toward faces more frequently than expected by chance (Experiment 1). The…

Parent assessment of infants who were born very preterm reveal that these children at two years of age demonstrate significantly higher internalizing and dysregulation scores than peers born at term.