Examined role of mother-toddler attachment in moderating the relationships between behavioral inhibition and changes in salivary cortisol levels in response to novel events. Subjects were 77 infants 18 months old. Found elevations in cortisol only for inhibited toddlers in insecure attachment relationships. Mothers in these relationships appeared…

Maintains that Carpenter, Nagell, and Tomasello's (1998) data reveal little definitive information on cognitive processes involved in infants' social interactive behaviors. Evaluates support for Carpenter et al.'s claims for infant social cognition and discusses the nature of infant cognition. Maintains that what is needed is experimental evidence…

Explored relation between temperament and cardiac vagal tone in 12-week olds. Found that infants with higher baseline vagal tone showed fewer negative behaviors in the laboratory and were less disrupted by experimental procedures than infants with lower baselines. Infants who decreased cardiac vagal tone during assessments were rated by mothers as…

Two experiments examined 6-month-olds' ability to discriminate between visual displays of various number of dots varying in size and position, and with controls for other extraneous variables. Findings indicated that infants could discriminate between large sets on the basis of numerosity if they differed by a large ratio (8 versus 16, but not 8…

Evaluated brainstem auditory evoked responses (BAERs) on 10- to 12-year-olds who had been classified as high or low reactive to unfamiliar stimuli at 4 months of age. Found that children previously classified as high reactive at 4 months had larger wave V components than did low reactive children, possibly suggesting greater excitability in…

Three developmental connectionist models simulate a purported shift from "featural" to "correlational" processing in infant categorization (models: Gureckis & Love, 2004/this issue; Shultz & Cohen, 2004/this issue; Westermann & Mareschal, 2004/this issue; empirical data: Cohen & Arthur, 2003; Younger, 1985; Younger & Cohen, 1986). In this article,…

Social precursors to symbolic understanding of pictures were examined with 100 infants ages 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 months. Adults demonstrated 1 of 2 stances toward pictures and objects (contemplative or manipulative), and then gave items to infants for exploration. For pictures, older infants (12, 15, and 18 months) emulated the adult's actions…

Different types of smiling varying in amplitude of lip corner retraction were investigated during 2 mother-infant games--peekaboo and tickle--at 6 and 12 months and during normally occurring and perturbed games. Using Facial Action Coding System (FACS), infant smiles were coded as simple (lip corner retraction only), Duchenne (simple plus cheek…

Vidic and Haaf (2004) questioned the idea that infants use head information to categorize cats as distinct from dogs (Quinn & Eimas, 1996) and argued instead that the torso region is important. However, only null results were observed in the critical test comparisons between modified and unmodified stimuli. In addition, a priori preferences for…

This article reports the behavior of 3 newborn chimpanzees in the first 4 months of life, reared by their mothers and living in a community of 14 chimpanzees in a semi-natural enriched environment. We focused on spontaneous activity during the night partly because sleeping behavior constitutes an essential part of the infants' activity.…

The study of gaze following in infants younger than 12 months of age has emphasized the effects of gesture, type of target, and its position or placement. This experiment extends this literature by examining the effects of adults' affective expression on 7-month-olds' gaze following. The effects of 3 affective expressions--happy, sad, and…

Two experiments tested the DeLoache, Pierroutsakos, Uttal, Rosengren, and Gottlieb (1998) claim that 9-month-old infants attempt to grasp objects depicted in photographs. In Experiment 1, 9-month-olds viewed an object, a photograph of the object, and 2 flat, nonpictorial displays. On average, they reached for the photograph and nonpictorial…

Forty infants (mean age 5 months) of depressed mothers and non-depressed mothers were seated in an infant seat and were exposed to four different degrees of animation, including a still-face Raggedy Ann doll (about two-feet tall suspended in front of the infant), the same doll in an animated state talking and head-nodding, an imitative mother and…

Human adults are more accurate at discriminating faces from their own race than faces from another race. This "other-race effect" (ORE) has been characterized as a reflection of face processing specialization arising from differential experience with own-race faces. We examined whether 3.5-month-old infants exhibit ORE using morphed faces on which…

Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a…