Suggests that infant and toddler play environments should provide (1) adult-planned experiences, such as walking on a constructed trail; (2) child-directed experiences, such as sand and water play; and (3) experiences of the natural environment, such as observing and examining flowers and animals. (BC)

Addresses claims by Ackles and Karrer (1991) that the neurophysiological evidence used to support Dannemiller and Banks' selective adaptation model of early infant habituation (1983) fails to do so. Some evidence that has emerged since 1983 shows that some aspects of habituation during early infancy cannot be explained by appealing to selective…

Conducted qualitative study of adoptive parents' (n=21 couples) reactions to recent open adoptions of their infants. Findings indicated overwhelmingly positive feelings about open adoption. Respondents often noted that issue of openness was eclipsed by other concerns: coping with infertility, finding a baby, dealing with personnel, and dealing…

Explores whether 5-month-old infants (N=56) develop numerical- or location-based expectations by using a violation of expectation paradigm with possible and impossible events. Reports that infants use a more abstract representation than object location, the numerical nature of which is discussed. Contains 25 references. (Author/ASK)

Investigated 4- and 7-month olds' matching of unfamiliar, dynamic faces and voices on basis of age or maturity. Found significant matching at both ages; infant's prior experience with children appeared to facilitate matching at 7 months. Also found visual preference for children's faces. Another experiment assessed matching by 7-month olds, only…

Two experiments presented infants with artificial language input in which at least two generalizations were logically possible. The results demonstrate that infants made one of the two generalizations tested, the one that was most statistically consistent with the particular subset of the data they received. The experiments shed light on how…

Three experiments with a novel variation of the inductive generalization procedure examined 18- and 22-month-olds' knowledge of objects' motion properties. Infants observed simple air and land movements modeled with an appropriate category member (e.g. dog) or an ambiguous block and were allowed to imitate with one or more of four exemplars. The…

Systematic ignoring and two modifications of it (systematic ignoring with minimal parental check and systematic ignoring with parental presence) were evaluated for treatment of Infant Sleep Disturbance (ISD). Fifteen infants (6-15 months of age) participated in a study utilising a multiple-baseline design across the three treatment programs.…

Four experiments investigated whether 12-month-old infants use perceptual property information in a complex object individuation task, using the violation-of-expectancy looking time method (Xu, 2002; Xu & Carey, 1996). Infants were shown two objects with different properties emerge and return behind an occluder, one at a time. The occluder was…

Grouping by luminance and shape similarity has previously been demonstrated in neonates and at 4 months, respectively. By contrast, grouping by proximity has hitherto not been investigated in infancy. This is also the first study to chart the developmental emergence of perceptual grouping longitudinally. Sixty-one infants were presented with a…

Very preterm (VPT) birth can account for thinning of the corpus callosum and poorer cognitive performance. Research findings about preterm and VPT adolescents usually describe a small posterior corpus callosum, although our research group has also found reductions of the anterior part, specifically the genu. The aim of the present study was to…

Previous research suggests that by 4 months of age infants use the eye gaze of adults to guide their attention and facilitate processing of environmental information. Here we address the question of how infants process the relation between another person and an external object. We applied an ERP paradigm to investigate the neural processes…

The present study investigated whether facial expressions modulate visual attention in 7-month-old infants. First, infants' looking duration to individually presented fearful, happy, and novel facial expressions was compared to looking duration to a control stimulus (scrambled face). The face with a novel expression was included to examine the…

Previous research has shown that English infants are sensitive to mispronunciations of vowels in familiar words by as early as 15-months of age. These results suggest that not only are infants sensitive to large mispronunciations of the vowels in words, but also sensitive to smaller mispronunciations, involving changes to only one dimension of the…

The goal of this study was to identify parenting behaviors practiced by a self-selected group of North American parents who identify themselves as attachment parents. This type of parenting is based on behaviors that are focused on infant needs and demands perhaps more strongly than are traditional mainstream western parenting practices. However,…