Infants of 8-28 weeks were tested to determine the smallest sound shift off midline and along the horizontal axis that the infants could reliably discriminate. Results indicated localization acuity increased with age. Video records revealed numerous auditory orienting behaviors with methodological implications. (RH)

Assessed 40 women's responses to young infants' cries. Mothers and nonmothers were similar in basic features of caregiving behaviors. Although the sound of infant cries may inform caregivers about distress level, caregiving behaviors appear to be determined by additional factors. (RH)

Two studies examined social responses to attractive and unattractive faces on the part of 123 infants of 12 months. Results suggest that visual and behavioral preferences for attractiveness are exhibited much earlier in life than was previously thought. (RH)

Longitudinal findings concerning five male and five female infants suggest a number of age-related changes in the dominant mode of visual scanning. Changes involve attention to locations of stimulus contours and prominent features of the stimulus, accuracy of saccades, and reversion to scanning behaviors typical of younger ages under certain…

Infants' detection of temporal increments to silent intervals "between" groups of tones was compared with their detection of comparable silent increments "within" groups of tones. Results indicated infants discriminated temporally altered sequences from standard only when increments occurred within group. Concludes perceptual…

Investigated acoustic characteristics of the cries of 20 infants whose mothers used marijuana during pregnancy. Cries of infants of marijuana users were shorter, had a higher percentage of dysphonation, a higher amd more variable fundamental frequency, and a lower first format than cries of 20 infants in a control group. (RJC)

Compares ratings which 20 parents and 22 nonparents made of spontaneous cries of 12 1-month-old infants. The duration, amount of dysphonation, and proportion of energy in various frequency bands were highly correlated with adults' ratings. (RJC)

Examined relations among adrenocortical stress reactivity, infant emotional or proneness-to-distress temperament, and quality of attachment in 66 infants tested at 9 and 13 months. Adrenocortical activity was not associated with attachment classifications. Significant only at 9 months, elevations in cortisol were small. (RH)

Infants were trained to kick their feet into a crib mobile and tested two weeks later. Found that presentation of a moving, but not a stationary, mobile in a reminder treatment 24 hours before testing alleviated forgetting in the test and that, in the test, memory of the kicking activity was specific to the conditions of the original training. (BC)

Two experiments tested 10-month-old infants' categorization abilities. Infants were presented with a sequence of stimuli depicting members of a given category. Stimuli representing nonmembers of the category were inserted into the sequence. Infants appeared to disregard the nonmembers in the sequence. (MDM)

Two experiments used a visual habituation paradigm to examine infants' categorical discrimination of the medial stop consonants /aba/ and /apa/. Results provided evidence of infant categorical discrimination based solely on closure duration. Infants shifted their boundary toward shorter closure durations if they received pulsing during…

In two studies, infants saw happy and angry expressions on a face or a dot display of a face and heard either a happy or angry vocalization. Except for infants who saw the dot display face in Study 1, infants looked more at the face which coincided with the vocal expression. (BC)

Three experiments involving 80 infants provide evidence that infants at 2.5 and 4 months represent objects and surfaces that they no longer perceive and that they operate on their representations to derive information about an event they have never perceived. Experiments suggest that cognition develops concurrently with perception and action. (SLD)

Findings reveal that memory retrieval at six months of age is highly specific to the setting in which the memory is acquired. This suggests that infants learn what events are associated with what places before they are able to locomote independently and acquire a spatiotemporal map of the relations between those places. (RH)

In 1 experiment, infants' ability to retain a memory for 24 hours was disrupted when infants were trained in 1 situational context and tested in another but not when they were trained in multiple contexts. In a second experiment, training in multiple contexts did not facilitate memory retrieval in a novel context after a long delay. (BC)