Few interventions and treatments for premature infants have undergone the rigors of a randomized controlled trial (RCT), the cornerstone of evidence-based healthcare. Multiple barriers in establishing a quality evidence base for the care of preterm infants are examined including the systematic exclusion of children from drug trials, vulnerability…

The earliest years of life are critical to providing a foundation for good health. Providing adequate health care early can prevent many of the physical, social-emotional, and cognitive impairments that children could face in the future. The recent landmark health reform package signed into law includes important elements that positively affect…

Responses to traumatic stress during the earliest years of life can change quickly and can be difficult to identify because of the young child's rapid rate of development. The symptoms of traumatic stress will depend on the child's developmental level and individual coping styles, as well as the quality and nature of the child's most important…

The "other-race effect" (ORE), or the finding that same-race faces are better recognized than other-race faces, is one of the best replicated phenomena in face recognition. The current article reviews existing evidence and theory and proposes a new theoretical framework for the ORE, which argues that the effect results from a confluence of social…

Infant-parent play with toys is an early form of social communication, and the toy features (i.e., affordances), as well as the child's language competence, contribute to the developmental level of the play and the types of play actions that occur. This research, conducted in cooperation with a toy manufacturer, investigated how the affordances of…

Words denoting manipulable objects activate sensorimotor brain areas, likely reflecting action experience with the denoted objects. In particular, these sensorimotor lexical representations have been found to reflect the way in which an object is used. In the current paper we present data from two experiments (one behavioral and one neuroimaging)…

Newborn infants appear to possess an innate bias that guides preferential orienting to and tracking of human faces. There is, however, no clear agreement as to the underlying mechanism supporting such a preference. In particular, two competing theories (known as the "structural" and "sensory" hypotheses) conjecture fundamentally different biasing…

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…

The purpose of this study was to investigate symptoms of comorbid disorders in infants and toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Research is scant on symptoms of co-occurring mental health conditions in this very young population. Method: Three hundred and twenty four participants were included in this study. Participants were classified…

Infants are frequently exposed to music during daily activities, including free play, and while viewing infant-directed videotapes that contain instrumental music soundtracks. In Experiment 1, an instrumental music soundtrack was played during a live or televised demonstration to examine its effects on deferred imitation by 6-, 12-, and…

Toward the end of their first year of life, infants' overly specified word representations are thought to give way to more abstract ones, which helps them to better cope with variation not relevant to word identity (e.g., voice and affect). This developmental change may help infants process the ambient language more efficiently, thus enabling…

Two experiments examined the effects of multimodal presentation and stimulus familiarity on auditory and visual processing. In Experiment 1, 10-month-olds were habituated to either an auditory stimulus, a visual stimulus, or an auditory-visual multimodal stimulus. Processing time was assessed during the habituation phase, and discrimination of…

This study investigates the relationship between having an older sibling and early goal-directed motor development. In a longitudinal study, infants were filmed playing with their mother and were observed at 5 and 12 months of age. After each observation, they were assessed with the Mental Bayley Scale. From the mother-child interaction, playing…

This study investigated a novel approach to obtaining data on parent and infant emotion during the Face-to-Face/Still-Face paradigm, and examined these data in light of previous findings regarding early autism risk. One-hundred and eighty eight non-expert students rated 38 parents and infant siblings of children who did (20) or did not (18) have…

This article introduces a promising new methodology called optical imaging. Optical imaging is used for measuring changes in cortical blood flow due to functional activation. The article outlines the pros and cons of using optical imaging for studying the brain correlates of perceptual, cognitive, and language development in infants and young…