Research on differential susceptibility to rearing suggests that infants with difficult temperaments are disproportionately affected by parenting and child care quality, but a major U.S. child care study raises questions as to whether quality of care influences social adjustment. One thousand three hundred sixty-four American children from…

The loss of a child during pregnancy or infancy raises challenging questions about how to communicate with very young siblings about the family's loss. What to say and how to say it varies with the developmental level of the child and the circumstances of the loss, as well as the family's culture, values, and beliefs. Children need open and honest…

A parent-report instrument, the First Year Inventory (FYI), was developed to assess behaviors in 12-month-old infants that suggest risk for an eventual diagnosis of autism. The target behaviors were identified from retrospective and prospective studies. FYIs were mailed to 5,941 families and 25% (N = 1,496) were returned, with higher return rates…

Smith and colleagues (Smith, L. B., Thelen, E., Titzer, R., & McLin, D. (1999). Knowing in the context of acting: The task dynamics of the A-not-B error. "Psychological Review, 106," 235-260) demonstrated that 10-month-olds succeed on a Piagetian AB search task if they are moved from a sitting position to a standing position between A and B…

There is currently controversy over the nature of 1-year-olds' social-cognitive understanding and motives. In this study we investigated whether 12-month-old infants point for others with an understanding of their knowledge states and with a prosocial motive for sharing experiences with them. Declarative pointing was elicited in four conditions…

Two experiments investigated how 16-20-week-old infants visually tracked an object that oscillated on a horizontal trajectory with a centrally placed occluder. To determine the principles underlying infants' tendency to shift gaze to the exiting side before the object arrives, occluder width, oscillation frequency, and motion amplitude were…

This work examined predictions of the interpolation of familiar views (IFV) account of object recognition performance in 5-month-olds. Infants were familiarized to an object either from a single viewpoint or from multiple viewpoints varying in rotation around a single axis. Object recognition was then tested in both conditions with the same object…

We examined whether infants organize information according to the newly proposed principle of common region, which states that elements within a region are grouped together and separated from those of other regions. In Experiment 1, 6- to 7-month-olds exhibited sensitivity to regions by discriminating between the displacement of an element within…

Individual differences in child temperament have been associated with individual differences in language development. Similarly, relationships have been reported between early nonverbal social communication (joint attention) and both temperament and language. The present study examined whether individual differences in joint attention might…

In this study, 1.5-year-olds were taught a novel word. Some children were familiarized with the word's phonological form before learning the word's meaning. Fidelity of phonological encoding was tested in a picture-fixation task using correctly pronounced and mispronounced stimuli. Only children with additional exposure in familiarization showed…

Based on findings that report differences between cries of normal and clinically abnormal infants, this study examined the relationship between birthweight and behavioral and acoustic features of neonatal cry because of the long-standing association between birthweight, perinatal trauma, and subsequent development. Subjects were 88 neonates…

Contends that cultural practices such as carrying the baby on the mother's back for prolonged periods can impact negatively on development of visual integration during the sensorimotor stage pathways by preventing adequate or enough crawling. Maintains that crawling is essential for cross- modality integration and that higher mental functions may…

This article outlines historical, socio-cultural, and research information that attests to the fundamental relationship between touch and child development. It describes applications including touch therapies with very low-birthweight infants, with fragile premature infants, and with infants of depressed mothers. (Contains extensive references.)…

Studied infant temperament in low birth weight (LBW) and full-term (FT) healthy infants in relation to infant temperament and child-rearing stress. Found that although differences between child-rearing stress scores were not significant between mothers of LBW and FT infants, a higher proportion of child-rearing stress could be explained by the…