We investigated the effects of distraction on attention and task performance during toddlerhood. Thirty toddlers (24- to 26-month-olds) completed different tasks (2 of each: categorization, problem solving, memory, free play) in one of two conditions: No Distraction or Distraction. The results revealed that the distractor had varying effects on…

The aim of this study was to examine the combined influences of infants' attention and use of social cues in the prediction of their language outcomes. This longitudinal study measured infants' visual attention on a distractibility task (11 months), joint attention (14 months), and language outcomes (word-object association, 14 months; MBCDI…

The goal of this study was to examine developmental change in visual attention to dynamic visual and audiovisual stimuli in 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old infants. Infant look duration was measured during exposure to dynamic geometric patterns and Sesame Street video clips under three different stimulus modality conditions: unimodal visual, synchronous…

Temperament works in combination with a child's environment to influence early socioemotional development. We examined whether maternal caregiving behavior at infant age 9 months moderated the relation between infant temperamental fear (9 months) and observations of children's social behavior with an unfamiliar peer at age 2 in a typically…

Previous studies have revealed that young infants can distinguish between displays of possible or impossible figures, which may require detection of inconsistent depth relations among local line junctions that disrupt global object configurations. Here, we used an eye-tracking paradigm to record eye movements in young infants during an object…

We investigated the development of the other-race effect "ORE" in a longitudinal sample of 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old Caucasian infants. Previous research using cross-sectional samples has shown an unstable ORE at 3 months, an increase at 6 months and full development at 9 months. In Experiment 1, we tested whether 9-month-olds showed the…

It is well established that 2-year-olds attribute a novel label to an object's global shape rather than local features (i.e., parts). Although recent studies have found that younger infants also attend to global rather than local features when given a label, the test stimuli in these experiments confounded parts and shape by varying both or…

This study examines face-scanning behaviors of infants at 6, 9, and 12 months as they watched videos of a woman describing an object in front of her. The videos were created to vary information in the mouth (speaking vs. smiling) and the eyes (gazing into the camera vs. cueing the infant with head turn or gaze direction to an object being…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the association between prenatal cigarette exposure and physiological regulation at 9 months of age. Specifically, we explored the possibility that any association between prenatal cigarette exposure and infant physiological regulation was moderated by postnatal environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)…

Although individual differences in reactions to novelty in the toddler years have been consistently linked to risk of developing anxious behavior, toddlers' attention toward a novel, putatively threatening stimulus while in the presence of other enjoyable activities has rarely been examined as a precursor to such risk. The current study examined…

Three-dimensional (3D) object completion, the ability to perceive the backs of objects seen from a single viewpoint, emerges at around 6 months of age. Yet, only relatively simple 3D objects have been used in assessing its development. This study examined infants' 3D object completion when presented with more complex stimuli. Infants…

Languages instantiate many different kinds of dependencies, some holding between adjacent elements and others holding between nonadjacent elements. In the domain of phonology-phonotactics, sensitivity to adjacent dependencies has been found to appear between 6 and 10 months. However, no study has directly established the emergence of sensitivity…

This study employed a new "anticipatory intervening" paradigm to tease apart false belief and ignorance-based interpretations of 18-month-olds' helpful informing. We investigated in three experiments whether 18-month-old infants inform an adult selectively about one of the two locations depending on the adult's belief about which of the two…

Recent studies suggest that even infants attend to others' beliefs in order to make sense of their behavior. To warrant the assumption of early belief understanding, corresponding competences need to be demonstrated in a variety of different belief-inducing situations. The present study provides corresponding evidence, using a completely nonverbal…

Recent studies demonstrated that in adults and children recognition of face identity and facial expression mutually interact (Bate, Haslam, & Hodgson, 2009; Spangler, Schwarzer, Korell, & Maier-Karius, 2010). Here, using a familiarization paradigm, we explored the relation between these processes in early infancy, investigating whether 3-month-old…