Fourteen-month-old infants were presented with static images of happy, neutral, and fearful emotional facial expressions in an eye-tracking paradigm. The emotions were expressed by the infant's own parents as well as a male and female stranger (parents of another participating infant). Rather than measuring the duration of gaze in particular areas…

Some actions of agents are ambiguous in terms of goal-directedness to young infants. If given reasons why an agent performed these ambiguous actions, would infants then be able to perceive the actions as goal-directed? Prior results show that infants younger than 12 months can not encode the relationship between a human agent's looking behavior…

Although research has demonstrated poor visual skills in premature infants, few studies assessed infants' gaze behaviors across several domains of functioning in a single study. Thirty premature and 30 full-term 3-month-old infants were tested in three social and nonsocial tasks of increasing complexity and their gaze behavior was micro-coded. In…

Past studies have identified individual differences in infant visual attention based upon peak look duration during initial exposure to a stimulus. Colombo and colleagues found that infants that demonstrate brief visual fixations (i.e., short lookers) during familiarization are more likely to demonstrate evidence of recognition memory during…

A number of studies have investigated infants' abilities to extract and discriminate number from multimodal events. These results have been mixed for several possible reasons, including aspects of the experimental design that provide perceptual cues that are unrelated to number, and are known to influence looking preferences. This experiment used…

The current study examined the effects of institutionalization on the discrimination of facial expressions of emotion in three groups of 42-month-old children. One group consisted of children abandoned at birth who were randomly assigned to Care-as-Usual (institutional care) following a baseline assessment. Another group consisted of children…

We monitored changes in looking that emerged when 3- to 6-month-old infants were presented with 48 trials pairing familiar and novel faces. Graphic displays were used to identify changes in looking throughout the task. Many infants exhibited strong side biases produced by infants looking repeatedly in the same direction. Although an overall…

The characteristics of scanning patterns between the ages of 6 and 26 weeks were investigated through repeated assessments of 10 infants. Eye movements were recorded using a corneal-reflection system while the infants looked at 2 dynamic stimuli: the naturally moving face of their mother and an abstract stimulus. Results indicated that the way…