A case study is reported in which early "autistiform behavior" in a 4-week-old baby was reversed through intensive mothering. The baby, who had been developing normally, was bottlefed by "strangers" for 2 days and then began to avert her eyes from all people, an autistiform behavior which persisted and grew worse as the mother tried to…

Orienting responses to visual and auditory stimuli were compared in 3 cohorts of preterm infants born between 1977 and 1987. The sample consisted of 128 infants born between 1977 and 1979, 129 infants born between 1980 and 1983, and 94 infants born between 1984 and 1987. The sample was divided into one group of 140 infants born between 25- and…

Research has demonstrated the occurrence of two structurally distinct modes of vocalization in the infant/mother pair--coaction and alternation--that change developmentally over the first year of the infant's life. The present study investigated the vocalization latencies of three infant/mother pairs at three stages of infant development: at 10…

This study examined mother/child interactions during feedings for full-term, healthy premature, and sick premature newborns. Ten first-born infants in each of these categories were observed with their parents once in the hospital, twice at home, and once in the laboratory during the first 4 months of life. Observations focused on the position in…

Based on PhD thesis submitted to Brown University (June 1967).

Preparation of this paper supported by U.S. Public Health Grant HD-0890, a grant from the Carenegie Corporation, and by U.S. Public Health Grant HD-2680.

In order to specify the factor structure and stability of infant and maternal behavior, mother/infant interaction was observed when infants were 12 and 24 months of age. Mothers and infants observed in dyadic interaction in a playroom during a 15-minute free play period represented a heterogeneous sample across gender, socioeconomic status, and…

This paper indicates the benefits obtained when child care center staff use a daily log to record the activities of infants in care. Designed to provide parents with information about their child's activities, the log consists of entries such as time of feedings, food consumed, diaper changes, stimulation, play, sleep periods, crying periods, and…

Four experiments (E1, E2, E3 and E4) investigated whether or not 5- to 7-month-old infants could detect auditory-visual relationships in audiovisual presentations of affective expressions, thereby perceiving the bimodally-presented expressions as unitary events. In E1, 16 infants were simultaneously shown two 2-minute films of a "happy"…

The interactions of 10-month-old infants and their mothers were observed using mathematical models of interaction which state that the child's behavior depends on recent characteristics of mother's behavior, and that the mother's behavior depends on recent characteristics of the child's. Therefore, changes in the intensity of the behavior of one…

The effects of minor illness on infants' social behavior were studied among disadvantaged infants who attended a day-care program. Twelve infants aged 4 1/2 to 6 months were observed once while playing alone and once while interacting with their teachers each week for 6 weeks. A time-sampling procedure was used to record frequencies of…

AN ATTEMPT TO ASSESS STIMULUS CONDITIONS IN THE ENVIRONMENT OF THE INFANT IN THE FIRST YEAR OF LIFE AND THE IMPACT OF THESE STIMULI ON HIS ADAPTIVE AND SOCIAL BEHAVIORS WAS PRESENTED. INFANTS WERE OBSERVED IN FOUR CHILD-REARING ENVIRONMENTS--RESIDENTIAL, KIBBUTZ, SINGLE-CHILD FAMILY, AND MULTIPLE-CHILD FAMILY. UNDER THEORETICAL ORIENTATION, THESE…

This study was designed to test two alternate hypotheses regarding the meaning of increased lateral head movements in infants during experiments in which the mothers' voices were displaced from their faces. One interpretation is that the lateral looking responses of the infants are attributable to maturational effects on the infants' physiological…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine whether a general perceptual model developed by Vitz and Todd (1971), capable of dealing with multiple determinants of attending, is useful for understanding infant attending. The model, previously used in research with adults, assumes that perception can be represented as a stochastic sampling…