Although infants display preferences for social stimuli early in their lives, we know relatively little about the mechanisms of infant learning about the social world. In the current set of studies, 1-month-old infants underwent an adapted eyeblink conditioning paradigm to examine learning to both "social" and non-social cues. While infants were…

The effects of individual versus category training, using behavioral indices of stimulus discrimination and neural ERPs indices of holistic processing, were examined in infants. Following pretraining assessments at 6 months, infants were sent home with training books of objects for 3 months. One group of infants was trained with six different…

The aim of this study was to examine the consonant-vowel co-occurrence patterns predicted by the Frame-Content theory in 16 nine-month-old babies with unrepaired cleft palate ([plus or minus]cleft lip) and 16 age-matched non-cleft babies. Babble from these babies was phonetically transcribed and grouped according to the intrasyllabic predictions…

The present research examined whether 3-month-old infants, the youngest found so far to engage in goal-related reasoning about human agents, would also act as if they attribute goals to a novel non-human agent, a self-propelled box. In two experiments, the infants seemed to have interpreted the box's actions as goal-directed after seeing the box…

Each year since 1997, the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics has published a report on the well-being of children and families. The "America's Children" series provides accessible compendiums of indicators drawn across topics from the most reliable official statistics; it is designed to complement other more…

Parents' involvement in early intervention (EI) services fosters positive developmental trajectories in young children. Although EI research on parenting skills has been abundant, fewer data are available on parents' knowledge of normative child development. Sixty-seven mothers of children participating in a Midwestern city's EI program completed…

Increasingly, technology plays an important role in the daily lives of children, both at home and at school. Making informed decisions about the wise application and frequency of technology and media use can be both challenging and overwhelming for parents, caregivers and educators. Many issues surround the unwise use of technology and media by…

Including fathers is the next frontier for infant mental health. In this article, the authors describe the inclusion of fathers as equal partners in Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP), an evidence-based treatment for young children experiencing or at risk for mental health problems following exposure to violence and other adversities. The authors…

This article describes an intense relationship between an infant mental health (IMH) specialist and a mother-daughter dyad. At intake, an 18-month-old little girl was diagnosed with failure to thrive and a chronic kidney condition, and she was at risk for protective service involvement and possible removal from the family home. The author…

Background: This study examined whether social-cognitive processes in children mediate relations between mothers' depressive symptoms across the first 3 years and children's first-grade social competence. Three maladaptive cognitions were examined: self-perceived social inadequacy, hostile attribution, and aggressive response generation.…

A rapidly growing industry creates and markets a vast range of screen media products designed specifically for babies and children under the age of three. Marketing of these products targets parents and is based on both implicit and explicit educational claims. Although the majority of products target literacy and numeracy, music presentations are…

Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs, parent-completed language development checklists) are a helpful tool to assess language in children who are unused to interaction with unfamiliar adults. Generally, CDIs are completed in written form, but in developing country settings parents may have insufficient literacy to complete them alone. We…

This research examined alternative mechanisms in the etiology of attachment disorganization. The authors hypothesized that negative intrusive parenting would significantly predict children's attachment disorganization at age 12 months within a diverse community sample. Of more substantial interest, the authors tested moderational mechanisms in the…

The present study aims to investigate the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication with respect to infants' perception of pointing gestures. Infants were presented with still images of pointing hands (cue) in combination with an acoustic stimulus. The communicative content of this acoustic stimulus was varied from being human and…

Introduction: This article describes the most prevalent visual conditions and other demographic characteristics of 5,931 young children with severe visual impairments in 28 states in the United States, the largest sample reported to date. The information presented in this article can assist in planning and implementing programs. Method: The data…