Behavioral responses of 3- to 4-day-old newborns to the odors of various human milk (HM) and formula milk (FM) were examined in paired-choice tests. When both stimuli were nonfamiliar, breast-fed, as well as bottle-fed, infants oriented their head and mouthed more vigorously to HM than to FM. When breast-fed infants were exposed to nonfamiliar HM…

Little is known about the acoustic cues infants might use to selectively attend to one talker in the presence of background noise. This study examined the role of talker familiarity as a possible cue. Infants either heard their own mothers (maternal-voice condition) or a different infant's mother (novel-voice condition) repeating isolated words…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate generalized imitation of manual gestures in 1- to 2-year-old infants. In Experiment 1, 6 infants were first trained four baseline matching relations (e.g., when instructed "Do this," to raise their arms after they saw the experimenter do so). Next, four novel gestures that the infants did not match in…

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the development of sleep-wake and melatonin diurnal rhythms over the first 3 months of life, and the potential effect of bed-sharing on their development. It was hypothesized that increased maternal contact through bed-sharing would affect the development of rhythms in human infants. Ten…

Studied infants' reactions to a Plexiglas box placed over a toy by their mothers. (JMB)

Adult influences on infant peer interaction were examined to determine whether infants would be more likely to sustain interaction with one another when their mothers were encouraging them to do so than they would when their mothers were busy with something else. A total of 36 infants, 14 months of age, were videotaped during 30-minute play…

In a study of infant smiling, 20 mother-infant dyads were videotaped in normal face-to-face interaction when the infants were 9 and 14 weeks of age. Videotapes were used to determine which of two classes of smiling behavior models, either arousal modulation or activation indicator, was most supported by empirical data. Arousal modulation models…

The major purpose of this study was to examine bimodal coordination of featural stimuli in infancy. Specifically of interest was infant sensitivity to the auditory and visual combinations that characterize male and female stimulus configurations. A total of 27 male and 27 female subjects of 3, 6, and 9 months of age participated in the study.…

Investigates the ability of 2-year-old children to pretend that one thing is another. Results indicate that when one thing is substituted for another, pretending varies as a function of the number of substitutions. (LLK)

Investigated the possibility that evidence of frequency discrimination might be found when the experimental procedures involved the conjugate reinforcement of nonnutritive sucking. (SDH)

The underlying theme of this review is that fine motor assessment for skills acquired during the first year of life includes a description of the coordination of reach and grasp behaviors into functional understanding, purposeful retention of an object, and manipulatian. The developmental sequence of these responses is listed in various…

Multiple regression analyses using maternal attitudes during pregnancy, obstetric analgesic medication, and labor variables as predictors did not yield impressive relationships to neonatal behavior as measured two days after delivery. (JMB)

Fifty 4-month-old infants were habituated to one wavelength of light and then tested for recognition with the original and two new spectral lights. After short- and long-term delays with different types of retroactive interference, the results indicated that the infants' recognition memory for hue was quite resilient to interference or delay. (JMB)