We assessed the eye-movements of 4-month-old infants (N = 38) as they visually inspected pairs of images of cats or dogs. In general, infants who had previous experience with pets exhibited more sophisticated inspection than did infants without pet experience, both directing more visual attention to the informative head regions of the animals,…

We examined how infants' categorization is jointly influenced by previous experience and how much they shift their gaze back and forth between stimuli. Extending previous findings reported by K. A. Kovack-Lesh, J. S. Horst, and L. M. Oakes (2008), we found that 4-month-old infants' (N = 122) learning of the exclusive category of "cats" was related…

Six-month-old infants' ("N" = 168) memory for individual items in a categorized list (e.g., images of dogs or cats) was examined to investigate the interactions between visual recognition memory, working memory, and categorization. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with six different cats or dogs, presented one at a time…

Despite a large literature on infants' memory for visually presented stimuli, the processes underlying visual memory are not well understood. Two studies with 4-month-olds (N = 60) examined the effects of providing opportunities for comparison of items on infants' memory for those items. Experiment 1 revealed that 4-month-olds failed to show…

We investigated longitudinally the development of attention in two free-play tasks and the relation between attention in those tasks and language ability in toddlerhood. We observed developmental differences in attention from 9 and 31 months both as children investigated a single object and as they investigated multiple objects. Attention in these…

Three experiments directly compared infants' categorization in variations of the visual familiarization task. In each experiment, 4- or 6-month-old infants were familiarized with a collection of dogs or cats and then their response to novel dogs and cats was assessed. In Experiment 1, 4-month-old infants responded to the exclusive distinction of…

One longitudinal and one cross-sectional study evaluated the interactive effects of endogenous and exogenous influences on infants' attention allocation by assessing the role of target familiarity on distraction latency during object exploration. Findings indicated that 9- and 10-month-olds, but not 6.5-month- olds, exhibited longer latencies as…