The theory of natural pedagogy stipulates that infants follow gaze because they are sensitive to the communicative intent of others. According to this theory, gaze following should be present if, and only if, accompanied by at least one of a set of specific ostensive cues. The current article demonstrates gaze following in a range of contexts,…

With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6- and 8-month-olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue-reward…

When 96 mothers and 46 fathers of 6- or 13-month-old infants independently generated behavioral cues they believed contributed to their perception of their infant's recent easiness/difficultness, few systematic differences were found between easy and difficult infants, 6- and 13-month-olds, males and females, and firstborn and later-born.…

In a laboratory procedure, 66 infants of 12 months were given happy, fearful, and conflicting emotional signals by their mothers and fathers with reference to five unusual toy stimuli. There were marked differences among infants in their capacity for and style of coping with conflict. A variety of specific responses to conflict were observed. (RH)

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a…

Used shift-rate recovery method in three experiments to examine extent to which 6-month-olds find perceptual cues such as density and length useful in discrimination of linearly arranged sets of large numbers of objects. Found that infants can discriminate between large number sets by relying on absolute cues such as density and on relative cues…

Trained 3-month olds to move an overhead crib mobile while one of two musical selections was played, and assessed retention one or seven days later in presence of same or different music. Found that infants displayed one-day retention regardless of musical selection. At seven days, retention was seen only when test music matched training music.…

Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Results suggested that at 4 months, infants attended primarily to the featural information, at 6 months primarily to the asynchrony, and at 8 months to both features independently. (Author/KB)