Examines the experiences of families in which fathers care for their newborn infants when mothers return to work after childbirth. Documents the hours of care provided by fathers while mothers are at work, the simultaneous use of other child-care arrangements, and the average savings per family. Explores three possible motivations for families to…

Examined affective and motoric reactivity hypothesized to be associated with later inhibited and uninhibited behavior. Affect and reactivity were classified at four months. Brain electrical activity was assessed at 9 months, and behavior toward novelty, at 14 months. Found that greater activation in both the left and right frontal hemispheres was…

Four experiments examined 8-month-olds' ability to reason about collections of objects. Findings suggested that infants' expectations about object behavior do not automatically apply to any and all portions of matter within the visual field. The behavior of an entity and infants' prior experience played roles in determining whether infants will…

Familiarized 6- and 8-month-olds with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. Found that only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. Results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the…

Tested in six experiments young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in faces and voices. Found that 4.5-month-olds showed no evidence of matching face and voice based on gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match based on the vowel. Robust evidence of ability to match based on gender was not evident…

Two experiments examined whether infants are sensitive to holistic combinations of line junctions in 2-D images that adults use to derive overall 3-D structure. Results suggested that 3-month-olds are sensitive to holistic combinations of line junctions that adults use to derive 3-D information but also selectively attend to these 3-D cues in…

Investigated 3-month-olds' categorization of animals and vehicles based on static and dynamic attributes. Found that regardless of viewing static or dynamic displays, infants showed habituation to varying exemplars from the same category, dishabituated to an exemplar from a novel category, and showed a novelty preference for a novel-category…

Recorded reaching and looking preferences and movement kinematics among 5- to 15-month-olds divided into 3 age groups. Found that 5- to 12-month-olds preferred looking first at a large object; 8.5- to 12-month-olds showed preference for reaching to smaller (graspable) objects. Kinematic measures suggested that onset of object-oriented action…

This study explored different gradations of emulation in the imitation of actions on objects by 17-month-olds. Experiment 1 established levels of behavioral reproduction following prerecorded video demonstrations similar to those levels following live demonstrations. In Experiment 2, two digitally modified videos, where object movements or body…

Infant-control habituation methodology, although serving the research community well, has never been carefully analyzed. A main use is to equate infants in their level of habituation prior to experimental manipulations in a posthabituation phase. When studied analytically and with simulation, it is found to have serious difficulties. It…

Previous research has investigated the effect of maternal soothing behaviors on reducing infant reactivity but not the differential effects of specific maternal behaviors on infant stress responses. The present study investigated maternal regulation of 2- and 6-month-olds' responses to an inoculation and found a significant decline with age in…

For successful communication to exist between a caregiver and infant, the caregiver must feel confident about her/his ability to parent and also have specific and accurate knowledge about the behaviours required for optimal care-giving; lack of this knowledge may lead to feelings of uncertainty and less than optimal communication. Studies indicate…

Several investigators find that infants fail to use property information to individuate objects until 12 months of age (e.g., Xu & Carey, 1996), while others find that infants successfully employ property information in the service of object individuation at 9.5 months (e.g., Wilcox & Baillargeon, 1998a). This study investigated…

This paper examines the impact of public health insurance expansions through both Medicaid and SCHIP on children's educational outcomes, measured by 4th and 8th grade reading and math test scores, available from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We use a triple difference estimation strategy, taking advantage of the…

Aim: Cognitive visual dysfunctions (CVDs) reflect an impairment of the capacity to process visual information. The question of whether CVDs might be classifiable according to the nature and distribution of the underlying brain damage is an intriguing one in child neuropsychology. Method: We studied 22 children born preterm (12 males, 10 females;…