This document presents an analysis of the early attending responses and orienting reactions of infants which can be observed at birth and shortly thereafter. Focus is on one specific orienting reaction, the early direction and maintenance of one's eyes and head toward certain stimuli instead of others. The physical properties of stimuli that…

This experiment asked whether infants at 5 months perceived an invariant over four types of rigid motion (perspective transformations), and thereby differentiated rigid motion from deformation. Four perspective transformations of a sponge rubber object (rotation around the vertical axis, rotation around the horizontal axis, rotation in the frontal…

This study compared infants' responsiveness to modeling versus instruction and examined the issue of whether providing supplementary linguistic information makes modeling and instruction more or less effective. A total of 72 infants between 15 and 21 months of age participated in the study. Subjects were randomly assigned to conditions which…

Reported are implications of the genesis and development of joint action between Spanish adults and their infants for early first language acquisition. Focusing on the naturally occurring context of the "give and take" game format, this investigation discloses the role of the interaction pattern in the language acquisition process,…

Orienting responses to visual and auditory stimuli were compared in 3 cohorts of preterm infants born between 1977 and 1987. The sample consisted of 128 infants born between 1977 and 1979, 129 infants born between 1980 and 1983, and 94 infants born between 1984 and 1987. The sample was divided into one group of 140 infants born between 25- and…

Research has demonstrated the occurrence of two structurally distinct modes of vocalization in the infant/mother pair--coaction and alternation--that change developmentally over the first year of the infant's life. The present study investigated the vocalization latencies of three infant/mother pairs at three stages of infant development: at 10…

This study examined mother/child interactions during feedings for full-term, healthy premature, and sick premature newborns. Ten first-born infants in each of these categories were observed with their parents once in the hospital, twice at home, and once in the laboratory during the first 4 months of life. Observations focused on the position in…

In order to specify the factor structure and stability of infant and maternal behavior, mother/infant interaction was observed when infants were 12 and 24 months of age. Mothers and infants observed in dyadic interaction in a playroom during a 15-minute free play period represented a heterogeneous sample across gender, socioeconomic status, and…

Four experiments (E1, E2, E3 and E4) investigated whether or not 5- to 7-month-old infants could detect auditory-visual relationships in audiovisual presentations of affective expressions, thereby perceiving the bimodally-presented expressions as unitary events. In E1, 16 infants were simultaneously shown two 2-minute films of a "happy"…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine whether a general perceptual model developed by Vitz and Todd (1971), capable of dealing with multiple determinants of attending, is useful for understanding infant attending. The model, previously used in research with adults, assumes that perception can be represented as a stochastic sampling…

This study explores the development of visual self-recgonition by examining the effect of rouge application on the subsequent mirror behavior of 96 infants, ages 9-24 months. Each infant was observed in front of a mirror in four consecutive conditions: (1) with no rouge applied to infant's nose (baseline), (2) with a dot of rouge on infant's nose,…

This report is based on a longitudinal analysis of physical-contact interaction of mother-infant pairs throughout the first year of life. The sample consisted of 26 middle-class mother-infant pairs who were observed in their homes for four hours once every three weeks. During each visit, the observer made a running record of everything that…

This report presents outcome data on infant motor activity and behavioral state. Subjects were 45 infants who had birth weight of less than 1,501 grams, were appropriate for gestational age, and were free of major complications. A total of 21 infants were studied during a preintervention (control period), and 24 were studied in a posttraining…

Pressure variations applied by newborns and by infants 1 to 4 months old to rubber nipples were recorded in three different procedures under no-fluid conditions. In the first study, infants were presented for 90 seconds with novel nipples varying in shape and in shape plus material. Results suggested that a developmental trend existed for an…

The ability of 1-month-old infants to recognize their mothers visually was explored with the live faces of mother and stranger presented in three different poses: en face (full face), half-profile, and profile. Subjects were 16 infants with normal Apgar scores at birth who were volunteered by their parents after an initial contact in a maternity…