Tested in six experiments young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in faces and voices. Found that 4.5-month-olds showed no evidence of matching face and voice based on gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match based on the vowel. Robust evidence of ability to match based on gender was not evident…

Two experiments examined whether infants are sensitive to holistic combinations of line junctions in 2-D images that adults use to derive overall 3-D structure. Results suggested that 3-month-olds are sensitive to holistic combinations of line junctions that adults use to derive 3-D information but also selectively attend to these 3-D cues in…

Investigated 3-month-olds' categorization of animals and vehicles based on static and dynamic attributes. Found that regardless of viewing static or dynamic displays, infants showed habituation to varying exemplars from the same category, dishabituated to an exemplar from a novel category, and showed a novelty preference for a novel-category…

Recorded reaching and looking preferences and movement kinematics among 5- to 15-month-olds divided into 3 age groups. Found that 5- to 12-month-olds preferred looking first at a large object; 8.5- to 12-month-olds showed preference for reaching to smaller (graspable) objects. Kinematic measures suggested that onset of object-oriented action…

This study explored different gradations of emulation in the imitation of actions on objects by 17-month-olds. Experiment 1 established levels of behavioral reproduction following prerecorded video demonstrations similar to those levels following live demonstrations. In Experiment 2, two digitally modified videos, where object movements or body…

Infant-control habituation methodology, although serving the research community well, has never been carefully analyzed. A main use is to equate infants in their level of habituation prior to experimental manipulations in a posthabituation phase. When studied analytically and with simulation, it is found to have serious difficulties. It…

Previous research has investigated the effect of maternal soothing behaviors on reducing infant reactivity but not the differential effects of specific maternal behaviors on infant stress responses. The present study investigated maternal regulation of 2- and 6-month-olds' responses to an inoculation and found a significant decline with age in…

Several investigators find that infants fail to use property information to individuate objects until 12 months of age (e.g., Xu & Carey, 1996), while others find that infants successfully employ property information in the service of object individuation at 9.5 months (e.g., Wilcox & Baillargeon, 1998a). This study investigated…

Research in the area of infant development has endless facets of investigation. No one facet of research is more important than another, and all of the findings work in a synchronous fashion to facilitate our understanding of child development. Research on child development has proliferated across the centuries. Infant characteristics like…

The current study distinguishes between attributions of goal-directed perception (i.e. attention) and non-goal-directed perception to examine 9-month-olds' interpretation of others' head and eye turns. In a looking time task, 9-month-olds encoded the relationship between an actor's head and eye turns and a target object if the head and eye turns…

Young infants use caregivers' emotional expressions to guide their behavior in novel, ambiguous situations. This skill, known as social referencing, likely involves at least 3 separate abilities: (a) looking at an adult in an unfamiliar situation, (b) associating that adult's emotion with the novel situation, and (c) regulating their own…

This study examined the effect of different types of loss of control on the quality and quantity of the frustration response in 4- to 6-month-old infants. To establish an expectancy, all infants received 4 minutes of contingency training in which infants were presented with slides and music after they performed a pulling response with their right…

Two studies used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine neural manifestations of emotion recognition in 7-month-old infants. In the first study, 20 infants were presented with 2 alternating achromatic slides of the same female model posing a happy and a fearful expression. Infants' ERPs revealed a prominent positive component to the happy face…

This study examined how change occurs in infant gestural communication. Five infants were videotaped once a week from 10 to 12 months and twice a week from 12 to 15 months during play sessions with their mothers in a laboratory playroom. These sessions consisted of 10 minutes of a structured play context in which infants were seated at a table at…

This study investigated two-month-old infants' memory for phonetic information using the high-amplitude-sucking procedure (HAS). Specifically, the study explored whether the availability of prosodic organization enhances infants' memory for the phonetic information they hear. After a baseline measure was obtained, infant sucking resulted in a…