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…

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…

To examine key parameters of the initial conditions in early category learning, two studies compared 5-month-olds' object categorization between tasks involving previously unseen novel objects, and between measures within tasks. Infants in Experiment 1 participated in a visual familiarization-novelty preference (VFNP) task with two-dimensional…

This study examined the effect of attention in young infants on the saccadic localization of dynamic peripheral stimuli presented on complex and interesting backgrounds. Infants at 14, 20, and 26 weeks of age were presented with scenes from a Sesame Street movie until fixation on a moving character occurred and then presented with a second segment…

Adults' processing of own-race faces differs from that of other-race faces. The presence of an "other-race" feature (ORF) has been proposed as a mechanism underlying this specialization. We examined whether this mechanism, which was previously identified in adults and in 9-month-olds, is evident at 3.5 months. Caucasian 3.5-month-olds looked…

Positive shyness is a universal emotion with the specific social function of regulating our interactions by improving trust and liking, and showing politeness. The present study examined early infant production of coy smiles during social interactions as a measure of positive shy behavior. Eighty 4-month-olds were experimentally observed during…

Eye-trackers suitable for use with infants are now marketed by several commercial vendors. As eye-trackers become more prevalent in infancy research, there is the potential for users to be unaware of dangers lurking "under the hood" if they assume the eye-tracker introduces no errors in measuring infants' gaze. Moreover, the influx of voluminous…

In 2004, McMurray and Aslin edited for "Infancy" a special section on eye tracking. The articles in that special issue revealed the enormous promise of automatic eye tracking with young infants and demonstrated that eye-tracking procedures can provide significant insight into the emergence of cognitive, social, and emotional processing in infancy.…

This paper presents two methods that we applied to our research to record infant gaze in the context of goal-oriented actions using different eye-tracking devices: head-mounted and remote eye-tracking. For each type of eye-tracking system, we discuss their advantages and disadvantages, describe the particular experimental setups we used to study…

Infant eye tracking is becoming increasingly popular for its presumed precision relative to traditional looking time paradigms and potential to yield new insights into developmental processes. However, there is strong reason to suspect that the temporal and spatial resolution of popular eye tracking systems is not entirely accurate, potentially…

It has long been thought that the prefrontal cortex, as the seat of most higher brain functions, is functionally silent during most of infancy. This review highlights recent work concerned with the precise mapping (localization) of brain activation in human infants, providing evidence that prefrontal cortex exhibits functional activation much…

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…

It is known that young infants can learn to perform an action that elicits a reinforcer, and that they can visually anticipate a predictable stimulus by looking at its location before it begins. Here, in an investigation of the display of these abilities in tandem, I report that 10-month-olds anticipate a reward stimulus that they generate through…

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…

The effect of background television on 6- and 12-month-olds' attention during 20 min of toy play was examined. During the first or second half of the session, a clip from a variety of commonly available television programs was presented. The duration and frequency of infants' looks to the toys and to the television indicated that regardless of age…