An infant control habituation-recovery procedure was used to study 3-month-old infants' discrimination of sad, happy, and surprise facial expressions. (Author/JMB)

A comparison was made of the behaviors of 64 12-month-old infants in situations where adult female strangers played either an active or a passive role. (Author/JMB)

Newborn infants showing anthropometric signs of atypical patterns of fetal growth were compared with infants of appropriate growth on the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale and on recently developed supplementary items. The sample consisted of lower-socioeconomic-status families in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and included teenage and older mothers.…

Temporal stability of play behavior and its consistency among toys differing in complexity was assessed by observing 40 eight-month-old infants. The relationship of stability of play to temperament was examined. Findings support the idea that behavioral consistency in infancy is similar to that reported for older children. (RH)

Two experiments assessed the importance of form versus function in 2-year-old infants' categorizations. Nonsense objects were constructed to independently vary form and function. Adults differentially directed subjects' attention to one or the other stimulus dimension. It was hypothesized that children's conceptualizations would vary as a function…

Twelve pairs of previously unacquainted 6-month-old infants were observed in the presence and absence of toys; interactive episodes beginning when an infant touched the peer or a toy held by the peer were examined. Results suggested that young peers influence each other's behavior, but the extent to which they do so depends on situational…

Tests the hypothesis that developmentally delayed children differ from normal children on tasks involving discernment of nuances, balancing competing stimuli, or acquiring and retaining selected information. Attention deployment behaviors in a free-play situation were examined for three groups: normally developing, Down syndrome, and…

The meaning of mothers' perceptions of their infants' temperamental "difficultness" was explored in three ways. Subjective ratings were elicited from mothers who listened to the cries of four- to six-month-old infants who were not their own. Acoustic properties of the cries of the infants were measured and effects of a variety of…

Found that infants who were delivered with their head turned right exhibited a neonatal right supine head orientation and a right-hand preference in visually guided reaching tasks at 19 weeks of age. Contrary to prediction, infants delivered with their head turned left did not exhibit a left-sided preference in either neonatal head position or…

Visual preference and habituation paradigms were used to investigate the ability of three-month-olds to recognize the photographed face of the mother and to discriminate it from another face. Infants discriminated between the pictures of the mother and a stranger, both in the preference test and in the recognition test after habituation.…

Twenty-two infants (6.7 to 12.3 months old) were tested on a visual-cliff apparatus both crawling and in a walker. Results suggest a maturation-based explanation of cliff-avoidance in infants. (CM)

Four groups of infants, 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 months of age, were presented with repeated speech stimuli which were synthesized exemplars of the sound, "baba," natural exemplars of "baba" or "kaba," or novel syllables on each trial. (RH)

In response to criticisms of a study conducted by Shaffran and Decarie, the author underscores the need for objective, accurate peer evaluation. Errors and misinterpretations in the critical article are reported and corrected. (Author/RH)