A study designed to investigate the effects of permanent maternal separation in infant rhesus monkeys, 60, 90, and 120 days of age, and housed individually or in Paris. Monkeys separated at 90 days and housed individually showed the highest levels of disturbance. (DP)

Concludes that both asymmetry of muscle tonus and somesthetic stimulation contribute to the normally occurring lateral differences in responsiveness, though other factors are involved. (MH)

Differences were found in the ease with which newborn infants habituate to stimuli in different modalities and in the ease with which different responses habituate to the same stimulus. (MH)

Study of 64 infants showed that (1) once infants began to cry, they tended to persist, (2) only older infants specifically missed their mothers, and (3) tendency to cry was not related to maternal responsiveness or sex of child. (MH)

Infrared television recordings were made of newborns' visual activity under monocular and binocular viewing conditions. Out-of-control eye movements were substantially more frequent in the presence of uniform light fields than in darkness for both groups. A distinction between exogenous and endogenous control of eye movements in newborns is…

Thirty-one infants ages 8 to 16 days were shown a ball, a ball picture, and a homogeneous stimulus card. Infants' reaching behavior was scored for each of the stimuli according to the following: (1) lateral extension of arm, (2) arcing movement of arm toward midline, and (3) flexion of arm toward the upper half of the body. (Author/MP)

Results from one experiment indicated that the temporal pattern and spectral complexity of moderately intense auditory stimuli influenced cardiac responses in 24 alert newborns. A second study extended the temporal-pattern effect to other vowel stimuli in a no-delay discrimination paradigm. (Author/RH)

Data obtained from a group of infants ranging in age from four to seven months did not support the existence of attentional inertia in this age range. (MP)

An adaptive up/down tracking procedure was used in combination with a visually reinforced head-turn response to examine infants' (6 to 18 months of age) auditory sensitivity for 500-, 2000-, and 8000-Hz tone bursts. Six-month-olds were significantly less sensitive to the 8000-Hz tone than to either lower frequency; older infants demonstrated…

To test whether six-month-old infants recognize the auditory similarity of speech sounds sharing a value on a phonetic-feature dimension, an operant head turn procedure was used. Results indicated that the performance of infants trained on phonetically related speech sounds was far superior to that of infants in the nonphonetic control group.…

The effectiveness of the Developmental Educational Birth through Two Project is shown in increased developmental scores of the handicapped young children (changes indicative of up to four or five months of progress beyond expected levels) and less restrictive follow-up placements. (CL)

The study revealed that the frequency and duration of positive caregiver behaviors significantly increased as a result of a home-based program to improve infant-caregiver interaction. (Author/CL)