Relationships support social animals' health, but maintaining relationships is challenging. When transitioning to parenthood, new parents balance pair-bond maintenance with infant care. We studied pair-bond maintenance via affiliation in 22 adult titi monkey pairs ("Plecturocebus cupreus") for 16 months centered around their first…

Current estimates are that more than one-third of the annual neonatal deaths worldwide occur in humanitarian and fragile settings (United Nations Population Fund 2015). In this article, we focus on the recent multistakeholder effort to produce the "Roadmap to Accelerate Progress for Every Newborn in Fragile and Humanitarian Settings…

This study explores how 7-month-old infants categorize graphical images varying in basic perceptual features by using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) task. Most participants were Caucasian and their parents had a higher education, but the family's socioeconomic background was mixed. Experiment 1 (N = 23) tested brain responses to…

Parents are often a good source of information, introducing children to how the world around them is described and explained in terms of cause-and-effect relations. Parents also vary in their speech, and these variations can predict children's later language skills. Being born preterm might be related to such parent-child interactions. The present…

Internalising problems are common within Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); early intervention to support those with emerging signs may be warranted. One promising signal lies in how individual differences in temperament are shaped by parenting. Our longitudinal study of infants with and without an older sibling with ASD investigated how parenting…

Exploration is considered essential to infant learning, but few studies have quantified infants' task exploration. The purpose of this study was to quantify how infants explored task space with their feet while learning to activate a kick-activated mobile. Data were analyzed from fifteen 4-month-old infants who participated in a 10-min mobile task…

Background: Spontaneous upper extremity movements in infancy provide insight on neuromotor development. Spatiotemporal kinematics have been used to evaluate typical development of reaching, a foundational motor skill in infancy. This study evaluates the relationship between spontaneous upper extremity movements, not elicited by a toy, and motor…

There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted…

This was a cross-sectional study that aimed to evaluate the association between breastfeeding and motor development of infants at 3-4 months of age in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul. The outcome, infant motor development, was evaluated through the Bayley Scale of Infant Development (Bayley III). The prevalence of infants that stopped…

Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to the parent's ability to treat the child as an individual with a mind of his or her own. Studies have found representational and interactional MM to predict child development, but more research is needed on the validity of representational MM in parents of infants. Therefore, we examine the reliability and validity of…

We conducted a close replication of the seminal work by Marcus and colleagues from 1999, which showed that after a brief auditory exposure phase, 7-month-old infants were able to learn and generalize a rule to novel syllables not previously present in the exposure phase. This work became the foundation for the theoretical framework by which we…

How do infants learn about the formal properties of language using only cues they can access in speech? And what intuitions do they bring to the learning problem? Chapter 2: To explore whether current notions of statistically-based language learning could successfully scale to infants' linguistic experiences "in the wild", we implemented…

This study examines the infant-father attachment in infants born preterm (<?1500?g at birth and/or?<?37 weeks gestation) in comparison to full-term infants. The infant-father attachment was assessed using the Strange Situation Procedure at a (corrected) age of 15 months. We found at least half of preterm and full-term infants (50.0% and…

Background: The current literature suggests a link between dummy (or pacifier) use and a number of both positive and detrimental consequences. Positive consequences include soothing effect and protection from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), while negative ones include increased risk of otitis media and dental malformation. However, there is…

Studies on the emergence of effects of socioeconomic inequality typically report that socioeconomic background is positively associated with early cognitive abilities. However, studies on looking behaviour in habituation tasks rarely investigate this association, although such tasks are standard in measuring cognitive abilities in infants. The…