Assessed delayed-response performance in 120 infants 7, 9, and 11 months old. Correct response was identified as either retrieval of a hidden object or a gaze toward its location. Performance improved with age, was above chance for each age group in each condition, and was more often correct for gaze response, suggesting a significant effect of…

The Infant Temperament Questionnaire was used to assess behavioral peculiarities of 30 infants born with low birth weight (LBW), compared to two control infants of normal birth weight assigned to each LBW case. LBW was significantly associated with infant's adaptability, with LBW infants presented as slower adapting. This behavioral feature was…

Maintains author's interpretation of 6-month-olds' behavior is consistent with task requirements in the 2000 study and previous work showing that infants use explanatory inferences to make sense of their world. Asserts that ability to understand that people communicate with persons but act on objects is precursor to infants' understanding at 9 to…

Little is known about the acoustic cues infants might use to selectively attend to one talker in the presence of background noise. This study examined the role of talker familiarity as a possible cue. Infants either heard their own mothers (maternal-voice condition) or a different infant's mother (novel-voice condition) repeating isolated words…

This literature review focuses on factors found to be associated with individual differences in infant night waking. Infant night waking that requires parent intervention to assist the infant to return to sleep is of special concern to parents because of the sleep deprivation and fragmentation that they experience. Both intrinsic and extrinsic…

Assessment of infants and children with dysphagia (swallowing problems) and feeding disorders involves significantly more considerations than a clinical observation of a feeding. In addition to the status of feeding in the child, considerations include health status, broad environment, parent-child interactions, and parental concerns.…

Through her theoretical and empirical work, Mary Rothbart has had a profound impact on the scientific understanding of infant and child temperament. This special issue honors her contributions through the presentations of original, contemporary studies relevant to three primary themes in Rothbart's conceptual approach: the expansive scope and…

In the study presented, the development of different fear regulation behaviors and their associations with preceding maternal sensitivity and depression is addressed. A sample of 64 mother-child pairs was examined at the children's ages of 4, 12, and 30 months. Four-month negative reactivity and 12- and 30- month behavioral inhibition and fear…

Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not…

In four experiments, we investigated whether 9-month-old infants are sensitive to the relationship between gaze direction and object location and whether this sensitivity depends on the presence of communicative cues like eye contact. Infants observed a face, which repeatedly shifted its eyes either toward, or away from, unpredictably appearing…

Using data from a longitudinal study of preterms and full-terms, the present study examined the structure of infant cognition at 12 months, the extent to which five 12-month abilities (attention, processing speed, recognition, recall, and representational competence) mediated the relation from prematurity to mental development at 2-3 years, and…

Previous studies indicate that the discrimination of native phonetic contrasts in infants exposed to two languages from birth follows a different developmental time course from that observed in monolingual infants. We compared infant discrimination of dental (French) and alveolar (English) place variants of /d/ in three groups differing in…

The authors examined the effects of locomotor experience on infants' perceptual judgments in a potentially risky situation--descending steep and shallow slopes--while manipulating social incentives to determine where perceptual judgments are most malleable. Twelve-month-old experienced crawlers and novice walkers were tested on an adjustable…

Intuition denotes the ability to judge stimulus properties on the basis of information that is activated in memory, but not consciously retrieved. In three experiments we show that participants discriminated better than chance fragmented line drawings depicting meaningful objects (coherent fragments) from fragments consisting of randomly displaced…

Visual events are defined by a number of dimensions--their location in space, content (color, shape, etc.), and time tags (onset, duration, etc.). The role of time in infants' performance in the Visual Expectation Paradigm (VExP) was studied to evaluate whether infants encode in their expectation representation the timing of events in addition to…