Reviews literature on attachment process between adopted children and their mothers. Explains empirical research in relation to Bowlby's theoretical formulation of attachment, basic thesis of which is that infants develop affectional bonds at specific ages of their development and, therefore, child's age at time of adoption is important…

Examined whether young infants produced differentially organized hand and arm actions in relation to affective expressions when the infants were presented with social and nonsocial stimuli. (PCB)

Describes the concept of sensitive and competent infant care in group child-care settings. Offers seven principles to provide a more complete picture of sensitive and competent care, covering aspects of caregiving including interactions with the child, providing opportunities for learning, and working with the child's own needs and schedules.…

Examined three components of the attachment-transmission model in 48 kibbutz dyads from communal and home-based sleeping arrangements. Found that security of infants' attachment relations and autonomy of mothers' attachment representations were associated with higher emotional availability scores. Poorer emotional availability was found in dyads…

Offers a framework for understanding how early separation and maltreatment affect infants' ability to securely rely on a foster parent. Argues that disruptions in primary attachment relationships, combined with maltreatment, place these infants at risk for insecure or disorganized attachments to foster parents. Maintains that foster parents need…

Two experiments investigated factors affecting joint visual attention in 12- and 18-month-olds. Findings indicated that parental pointing at objects elicited more episodes of joint visual attention than looking alone. Although infants most reliably followed gestures to targets in front of them, even 12-month-olds followed gestures to targets…

Three experiments examined the relation between language acquisition and other symbolic abilities in 18- and 26-month-olds. Found that 18-month-olds spontaneously interpreted gestures, like words, as names for object categories. At 26 months, they spontaneously interpreted words as names and novel gestures as names only when given additional…

Examined whether putative regulatory behaviors widely assumed to be conceptually associated with certain behavioral strategies were associated with the changes in fearful and angry distress in 6-, 12-, and 18-month-olds. The key finding was that the use of some putative regulatory behaviors (distraction and approach) reduced the observable…

Evaluated in three experiments a dynamic systems theory account of perseverative errors on "A-not-B" task. Found that 9-month-olds perseverated when reaching for identical targets, but made nonperseverative responses when reaching in the presence of a highly distinctive B target. Reach direction was jointly determined by target's…

Examined three possible explanations for findings that infants detect textural discrepancies based on individual features more readily than on feature conjunctions. Found that none of the proposed factors could explain 5.5-month-olds' superior processing of featural over conjunction-based textural discrepancies. Findings suggest that in infancy,…

Four experiments examined very young infants' expectations about containment events. Found that 2- to 3.5-month-olds recognized that objects could be lowered inside a container with an open but not a closed top. Three-and-a-half-month-olds realized that objects could not pass through the container's back wall and should have moved with it to a new…

Compared disyllabic sequences from infants and adults according to their use of frequency, intensity, and duration to mark stress. Concluded that infants in English language environments produce adult-like stress patterns before they produce lexical items, which specify stress. Acoustic and perceptual analyses indicated infants use three acoustic…

Tested 90 infants in the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) with both parents. Found that mothers' Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) scores predicted infant-mother SSPs and fathers' AAIs predicted infant-father SSPs. Counter to expectation, infant-father SSPs were associated with infant-mother SSPs, which might be explained by the influence of…

Two longitudinal studies examined social-cognitive skill emergence in 9- to 15-month olds, mother-infant interaction regarding joint attentional engagement, and infant's communicative competence. Findings indicated a reliable pattern of social-cognitive skill emergence and that amount of time spent in joint engagement with mothers and mothers' use…

Describes connectionist model showing exclusivity asymmetries when categorizing visual stimuli, similar to pattern shown by infants. Examines asymmetries in terms of an associative learning mechanism, distributed internal representations, and statistics of feature distributions in the stimuli. Details test of model with infants, finding that…