A study involving 90 children (50 preterm and 40 full-term) found continuity in visual recognition memory from early infancy (7 months) to later childhood (11 years), even when other measures of memory at 11 years were controlled. Implications for the study of other types of infant memory are discussed. (SLD)

The cues that reactivate forgotten memories of young infants are highly specific. Three experiments examined whether this specificity decreases over repeated reactivations. Results confirm that different memory attributes become inaccessible at different rates and that repeatedly retrieved and older memories are less likely to be less detailed.…

Investigates the concept of animacy of 9- and 12-month-old infants by exposing them to autonomous motion with animate and inanimate objects in a series of three experiments. Three experiments were carried out. Results indicated that infants discriminate animate from inanimate objects on the basis of motion cues by the age of nine months. (MOK)

In six experiments, infants were habituated to word-object pairings and then presented with a familiar word and object in a previously seen and a new pairing. Found that 14-month olds formed word-object associations under these conditions when the objects were moving; 8- to 12-month olds did not form associations but appeared to process the word…

Examined infants' categorization using object manipulation tasks that involved objects that were models of animals, vehicles, or furniture. Objects were normal, had anomalous moving parts (such as a dog with wheels), or had different textures. Found that 14- to 22-month olds attended to the parts and structural configuration of objects, but not to…

Results of an examination of recognition memory in typically-developing 6- and 9-month-old infants using the Visual Paired-Comparison task show that infants of both ages display a novelty preference when the delay interval is 10 seconds or 5 minutes. After 1 month, younger infants performed at chance levels and older ones looked longer at the…

Examined covert attention shifts in infants with event-related potentials (ERPs). Found that reaction time to localize target showed covert attention shifts. There was a larger P1 ERP component on valid trials than on invalid trials or on no-cue control trials. Pre-saccadic ERP potentials in response to target were larger when target was in cued…

Examined in two studies referential understanding in 12- and 18-month-olds' responses to another's emotional outburst. Found that infants relied on the presence versus absence of referential cues to determine whether an emotional message should be linked with a salient object and they actively consulted referential cues to disambiguate the…

We examined the effect of stimulus complexity and frequency on infants' attention responses during an auditory habituation procedure. Five stimuli of different complexity and frequency were presented repeatedly to 80 5-month-old infants. Quicker attention-getting and longer attention-holding responses were obtained with the more complex stimuli.…

Pitch perception is fundamental to melody in music and prosody in speech. Unlike many animals, the vast majority of human adults store melodic information primarily in terms of relative not absolute pitch, and readily recognize a melody whether rendered in a high or a low pitch range. We show that at 6 months infants are also primarily relative…

The influence of body parts on 4-month-olds' categorization of cats and dogs was examined using a visual preference procedure. Infants were familiarized with pictures of exemplars from one of two categories, cat or dog. In test, looking time to an out-of-category exemplar was compared to looking time to a novel within-category exemplar with one…

Visual preference procedures were used to investigate development of perceptually based subordinate-level categorization in 3- to 7-month-old infants. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that 3- to 4-month-olds did not form category representations for photographic exemplars of subordinate-level classes of cats and dogs (i.e., Siamese vs. Tabby,…

This research explored the development of one insight about the mind, namely, the belief that people's trains of thought differ even when they see the same stimulus. In Study 1, 5-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and adults heard stories about characters who saw the same object. Although the older groups predicted the object would trigger different trains…

Behavioral responses of 3- to 4-day-old newborns to the odors of various human milk (HM) and formula milk (FM) were examined in paired-choice tests. When both stimuli were nonfamiliar, breast-fed, as well as bottle-fed, infants oriented their head and mouthed more vigorously to HM than to FM. When breast-fed infants were exposed to nonfamiliar HM…

The present study examined and contrasted beliefs and decision-making practices concerning the use of assistive technology (AT) with infants and toddlers. Participants were 424 multidisciplinary early intervention providers drawn from across the United States. A majority of professionals disagreed with proposed belief statements about AT with…