Two experiments examined the effects of multimodal presentation and stimulus familiarity on auditory and visual processing. In Experiment 1, 10-month-olds were habituated to either an auditory stimulus, a visual stimulus, or an auditory-visual multimodal stimulus. Processing time was assessed during the habituation phase, and discrimination of…

This study investigates the relationship between having an older sibling and early goal-directed motor development. In a longitudinal study, infants were filmed playing with their mother and were observed at 5 and 12 months of age. After each observation, they were assessed with the Mental Bayley Scale. From the mother-child interaction, playing…

This study investigated a novel approach to obtaining data on parent and infant emotion during the Face-to-Face/Still-Face paradigm, and examined these data in light of previous findings regarding early autism risk. One-hundred and eighty eight non-expert students rated 38 parents and infant siblings of children who did (20) or did not (18) have…

This article introduces a promising new methodology called optical imaging. Optical imaging is used for measuring changes in cortical blood flow due to functional activation. The article outlines the pros and cons of using optical imaging for studying the brain correlates of perceptual, cognitive, and language development in infants and young…

In a mere 3 decades, infant mental health has grown from an intriguing but obscure clinical approach to young children into a broad-based, multidisciplinary effort to enhance the development and well-being of young children and families through research, practice, and policy. The authors review some of the original premises of infant mental health…

Sensory Food Aversion is one of the most common feeding disorders during the first 3 years of life, when young children are transitioned to self-feeding, and when issues of autonomy and dependency have to be negotiated between parents and child. In this article, the author discusses "picky eaters" and the importance of distinguishing between…

In everyday word learning words are only sometimes heard in the presence of their referent, making the acquisition of novel words a particularly challenging task. The current study investigated whether children (18-month-olds who are novice word learners) can track the statistics of co-occurrence between words and objects to learn novel mappings…

Five experiments examined 79 newborns' ability to discriminate and categorize a spatial relation, defined by the left-right spatial position of a blinking object-target with respect to a vertical landmark-bar. Three-day-old infants discriminated the up versus low position of an object located on the same side of the landmark-bar (Experiment 1) and…

Ten- and 14-month-old infants' gaze was recorded as the infants observed videos of different hand actions directed toward multiple goals. Infants observed an actor who (a) reached for objects and displaced them, (b) reached for objects and placed them inside containers, or (c) moved his fisted hand. Fourteen-month-olds, but not 10-month-olds,…

In six experiments with English-learning infants, we examined the effects of variability in voice and foreign accent on word recognition. We found that 9-month-old infants successfully recognized words when two native English talkers with dissimilar voices produced test and familiarization items (Experiment 1). When the domain of variability was…

Cerebral folate deficiency (CFD) is associated with low levels of 5-methyltetrahydrofolate in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) with normal folate levels in the plasma and red blood cells. The onset of symptoms caused by the deficiency of folates in the brain is at around 4 to 6 months of age. This is followed by delayed development, with deceleration…

The current experiments address several concerns, both empirical and theoretical in nature, that have surfaced within the verb learning literature. They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large and largely unexplained gap between infants' well-documented ability to acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather…

The origin of color categories has been debated by psychologists, linguists and cognitive scientists for many decades. Here, we present the first electrophysiological evidence for categorical responding to color before color terms are acquired. Event-related potentials were recorded on a visual oddball task in 7-month old infants. Infants were…

Six-, 12-, and 18-month-old English-hearing infants were tested on their ability to discriminate nonword forms ending in the final stop consonants /k/ and /t/ from their counterparts with final /s/ added, resulting in final clusters /ks/ and /ts/, in a habituation-dishabituation, looking time paradigm. Infants at all 3 ages demonstrated an ability…

This study examines whether feeding infants formula supplemented with long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFA) improves cognitive function of 9-month-olds. Participants included 229 infants from 3 randomized controlled trials. Children received either formula supplemented with docosahexaenoic acid and arachidonic acid, or a control formula…