Tested 90 infants in the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) with both parents. Found that mothers' Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) scores predicted infant-mother SSPs and fathers' AAIs predicted infant-father SSPs. Counter to expectation, infant-father SSPs were associated with infant-mother SSPs, which might be explained by the influence of…

Two longitudinal studies examined social-cognitive skill emergence in 9- to 15-month olds, mother-infant interaction regarding joint attentional engagement, and infant's communicative competence. Findings indicated a reliable pattern of social-cognitive skill emergence and that amount of time spent in joint engagement with mothers and mothers' use…

Maintains that Muller and Overton (1998) misrepresent her theory of infant concept formation in infancy, makes corrections to their representation, and notes that her theory was developed in part because of the lack of detailed mechanisms in Piaget's theory to account for concept formation. Argues that Muller and Overton's proposed alternative…

Describes connectionist model showing exclusivity asymmetries when categorizing visual stimuli, similar to pattern shown by infants. Examines asymmetries in terms of an associative learning mechanism, distributed internal representations, and statistics of feature distributions in the stimuli. Details test of model with infants, finding that…

Presented neonates with lexical and grammatical words prepared from natural maternal speech. Found that neonates could categorically discriminate the sets based on a constellation of perceptual cues that distinguished them. Suggested that this ability to discriminate words on basis of multiple acoustic/phonological cues provides a perceptual base…

Three habituation experiments examined the necessary conditions under which infants invoked the principle of rational action, interpreting behavior as goal-directed action. Found that the rational action principle operated at 9 months but not at 6 months. Perceptual cues indicating agency were not necessary prerequisites for a goal-directed…

Examined whether the atypical pattern of brain activity found in infants of depressed mothers generalized to situations not involving the mother. Found that 13- to 15-month-olds of depressed mothers exhibited reduced left--relative to right--frontal activity during baseline and during interactions with mother and familiar experimenter. This…

Five experiments with 12-, 15-, and 18-month-olds examined 276 infants' ability to learn from television under semi-naturalistic conditions. Findings indicated that infants of all ages imitated live-modeled actions. There were age- and task-related differences in infants' ability to imitate the same television-modeled actions. Findings highlighted…

Compared food texture preferences during infancy and toddlerhood. Found that infants displayed more negative expressions and head and body movements in response to complex textures than to simple textures. Toddlers displayed more positive head and body movements and more eagerness in response to complex than to simple textures. Experience with…

Two studies investigated whether 10- to 11-month-olds possess skills for parsing ongoing behavior along boundaries correlated with initiation and completion of intentions. Found that infants showed renewed interest in test videos in which motion paused in the midst of an actor's pursuit of intentions; suspended motion at intentional boundary…

Suggests that the findings of Legerstee, Barna, and DiAdamo (2000) are most parsimoniously explained by associative learning and may not constitute a precursor to later understanding of intentionality. Argues for the importance of differentiating between associative and inferential processes and reviews evidence that the understanding of…

Investigated from a dynamic systems perspective mutual regulation during naturalistic interaction of mothers with their 4-month-olds. Found that mothers and infants communicated primarily through vocal signals and responses. Levels of contingent responsiveness between partners were significantly associated and occurred within distinct behavioral…

Three experiments assessed the extent to which statistical learning generates novel word-like units, rather than probabilistically-related strings of sounds. Found that 8-month-olds' listening preferences were affected by the context (English versus nonsense) in which items from the familiarization phase were embedded during testing. Confirmed…

Studied in three experiments the distribution and malleability of visual attention in 5-month-olds while they inspected large geometric designs. Established that infants who were short-lookers had novelty scores above chance, whereas long-lookers demonstrated chance responding. Illuminating different parts of visual display induced long-lookers to…

The present research investigated whether 13.5-month-old infants would attribute to an actor a disposition to perform a recurring action, and would then use this information to predict which of two new objects--one that could be used to perform the action and one that could not--the actor would grasp next. During familiarization, the infants…