The study examined whether performance profiles on individual items of the Toddler Module of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule at 12 months are associated with developmental status at 24 months in infants at high and low risk for developing Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). A nonparametric decision-tree learning algorithm identified sets of…

Recent research demonstrated that although 24-month-old infants do well on the initial pairing of a novel word and novel object in fast-mapping tasks, they are unable to retain the mapping after a 5 min delay. The current study examines the role of familiarity with the objects and words on infants' ability to bridge between the initial fast…

Despite a significant body of work that documents the importance of mother-child relationships, the studies on programmes that support these relationships are few, particularly with respect to subclinical populations. In this report, we coded the responses of 114 mothers of infants and toddlers to open-ended questions in order to identify the…

The rapid visual detection of other people in our environment is an important first step in social cognition. Here we provide evidence for selective sensitivity of the human visual system to upright depictions of conspecifics. In a series of seven experiments, we assessed the impact of stimulus inversion on the detection of person silhouettes,…

This study was designed to examine the generalizability and validity of the First Year Inventory (FYI) in Israel. Parents completed the FYI about their 12-month-olds (N = 471). Up to one month later, 17 at-risk and 38 non-risk infants participated in an assessment in which the Autism Observation Scale for Infants (AOSI) and the Mullen Scales of…

Perceptual narrowing in the visual, auditory, and multisensory domains has its developmental origins during infancy. The current study shows that experimentally induced experience can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing on infants' visual recognition memory of other-race faces. Caucasian 8- to 10-month-olds who could not discriminate…

How do young infants discover word meanings? We have theorized that caregivers educate infants' attention (cf. Gibson, J.J., 1966) by synchronizing the saying of a word with a dynamic gesture displaying the object/referent (Zukow-Goldring, 1997). Detecting an amodal invariant across gesture and speech brackets the word and object within the…

We explored the role that exogenous and endogenous competitors for attention play in infants' abilities to encode and retain information over a 6-month period. Sixty-six children visited the laboratory at 15 months, and 32 returned for a second visit at 21 months. Children observed models of conventional- relation and enabling-relation action…

This paper attempts to convey how the ideas of Klein, Bion and Bick underpin psychoanalytically based interventions with parents, babies and young children in the Camden Under Fives' Service, Tavistock Clinic. As the title suggests, my focus is on ways in which anxiety relating to separation and loss, can be contained through the transformative…

The current study examined the effectiveness of the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP) with lower-income and racial/ethnic minority (African American and Latino/a) couples. Additionally, we tested whether relationship outcomes varied based on the delivery format (i.e., group format vs. couple format). The sample included 321…

Infants' abilities to discriminate native and non-native phonemes have been extensively investigated in monolingual learners, demonstrating a transition from language-general to language-specific sensitivities over the first year after birth. However, these studies have mostly been limited to the study of vowels and consonants in monolingual…

A central feature of human psychology is our pervasive tendency to divide the social world into "us" and "them". We prefer to associate with those who are similar to us over those who are different, preferentially allocate resources to similar others, and hold more positive beliefs about similar others. Here we investigate the developmental…

Young infants respond to positive and negative speech prosody (A. Fernald, 1993), yet 4-year-olds rely on lexical information when it conflicts with paralinguistic cues to approval or disapproval (M. Friend, 2003). This article explores this surprising phenomenon, testing one hundred eighteen 2- to 5-year-olds' use of isolated pitch cues to…

Background: Siblings of children with autism (sibs-A) are at increased genetic risk for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and milder impairments. To elucidate diversity and contour of early developmental trajectories exhibited by sibs-A, regardless of diagnostic classification, latent class modeling was used. Methods: Sibs-A (N = 204) were assessed…

Objective: We conducted a meta-analysis of epidemiological studies investigating the association between maternal age and autism. Method: Using recommended guidelines for performing meta-analyses, we systematically selected, and extracted results from, epidemiological scientific studies reported before January 2012. We calculated pooled risk…