Preferential-looking studies suggest that by 2 months of age, infants may have knowledge about some object properties, such as solidity. Manual search studies of toddlers examining these same concepts, however, have failed to provide evidence for the same understanding. Investigators have recently attempted to reconcile this disparity but failed…

When a baby screams, that is a signal that all is not well for the body of the baby, for her emotional well-being, and/or for the baby's relationship with the teacher. During the first year of life, infants learn that adults are in control of providing reassuring care. Adults will "make things better" when a baby's tummy feels horribly empty, when…

Children who enter foster care typically have had little or not experience with play. This article describes the impact of play deprivation on early development. It provides guidelines for recognizing play deprivation and describes ways to help babies and young children develop a repertoire of play behaviors that is based on secure relationships…

Changes to a scene often go unnoticed if the objects of the change are unattended, making change detection an index of where attention is focused during scene perception. We measured change detection in school-age children and young adults by repeatedly alternating two versions of an image. To provide an age-fair assessment we used a bimanual…

Infants' sensitivity to social contingencies was assessed. In Study 1, 1-month-old infants and their mothers interacted face-to-face in three types of imperfect contingent interactions: Normal, Non-Contingent and Imitation. One-month-old infants did not discriminate these conditions. In Study 2, 3-month-old infants were tested as in Study 1. At 3…

The focus of the present study was the role of cultural learning in infants' acquisition of pretense actions with objects. In three studies, 18- and 24-month-olds (n= 64) were presented with novel objects, and either pretense or instrumental actions were demonstrated with these. When children were then allowed to act upon the objects themselves,…

This paper introduces the notion of frequent frames, distributional patterns based on co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences, then investigates the usefulness of this information in grammatical categorization. A frame is defined as two jointly occurring words with one word intervening. Qualitative and quantitative results from distributional…

This study used cortical source analysis to locate potential cortical sources of event-related potentials (ERPs) during covert orienting in infants aged 14 and 20 weeks. The infants were tested in a spatial cueing procedure. The reaction time to localize the target showed response facilitation for valid trials relative to invalid or neutral…

While very young children's understanding of objects as symbols for other entities has been the focus of much investigation, very little is known concerning the emergence of comprehension for symbolic relations among actions modeled with toy replicas and their real counterparts. We used videotaped depictions of real actions in a preferential…

Twenty-five newborn infants were tested for auditory-oral matching behavior when presented with the consonant sound /m/ and the vowel sound /a/--a precursor behavior to vocal imitation. Auditory-oral matching behavior by the infant was operationally defined as showing the mouth movement appropriate for producing the model sound just heard (mouth…

This article describes the revised and updated "Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood, Revised Edition (DC:0-3R)." The authors describe the impetus for developing the original diagnostic classification system for children from birth to age 3 in the 1980s. There was a need for a diagnostic…

Each of the elements required to create a healthy baby--genetics, the anatomy of the male and female reproductive system, the processes by which eggs and sperm are produced, the processes by which the embryo is created and implanted, maternal health during pregnancy, and embryonic/fetal growth and development--is vulnerable to damage by…

Previous research has shown that 6- to 9-month-old infants detect role reversals in dyadic interaction involving 2-argument relations. These studies extend this line of research to a 3-argument structure: An agent gives an object to a recipient. We conducted 4 experiments in a novelty-preference paradigm. Infants were habituated to videotaped…

New mothers recognize that motherhood is a special task in their lives and realize that input from others provides assistance on behalf of their babies and toddlers. The Pacella Parent Child Center of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society is a community of mothers and babies/toddlers where the staff helps mothers address the challenges…

A modified elicited imitation task was used to examine the development of the ability to resist and overcome interference in the 2nd and 3rd years of life. In the modified task, distractor props were included in the test array, so that children could imitate the modeled sequence but could also produce actions with the additional props provided,…