This study examined the effects of program pacing, defined as the rate of scene and character change per minute, on infants' visual attention to video presentations. Seventy-two infants (twenty-four 6-month-olds, twenty-four 9-month-olds, twenty-four 12-month-olds) were exposed to one of two sets of high- and low-paced commercial infant DVDs. Each…

Differences in infant distress and regulatory behaviors based on the quality of attachment to mother, emotion context (frustration versus fear), and whether or not mothers were actively involved in the emotion-eliciting tasks were examined in a sample of ninety-eight 16-month-old infants and their mothers. Dyads participated in the Strange…

How do young children direct their attention to other people in the natural world? Although many studies have examined the perception of faces and of goal-directed actions, relatively little work has focused on what children will look at in complex and unconstrained viewing environments. To address this question, we showed videos of objects,…

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…

Following Meltzoff's (1995) behavioral reenactment paradigm, this study investigated the ability of 12-month-olds (N = 44) to reproduce a model's attempted-but-failed actions on objects. Testing was conducted using a novel set of objects designed to enable young infants to readily identify the potential outcome of the model's actions. Infants who…

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…

Research suggests that nonlinguistic sequence learning abilities are an important contributor to language development (Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010). The current study investigated visual sequence learning (VSL) as a possible predictor of vocabulary development in infants. Fifty-eight 8.5-month-old infants were presented with a…

We examined two aspects of temperamental approach in early infancy, positive reactivity and anger, and their unique and combined influences on maternal reports of child surgency and attention focusing at 4 years of age. One hundred and fourteen infants were observed for their positive reactions to novel stimuli at 4 months, and their anger…

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…

Using electrocardiogram data with 78 six-month-old infants, this study examined the presence or absence of brief orienting bradycardia during the onset of maternal arm-restraint and subsequent differences between infants on behavioral organization during restraint. Results showed that 45 of the infants exhibited brief episodes of bradycardia at…

In a socially diverse sample of 206 infant-mother pairs, we investigated predictors of infants' attachment security at 15 months, with a particular emphasis on mothers' tendency to comment appropriately or in a non-attuned manner on their 8-month-olds' internal states (so-called mind-mindedness). Multinomial logistic regression analyses showed…

Two preferential-reaching experiments explored 5- and 7-month-olds' sensitivity to pictorial depth cues. In the first experiment, infants viewed a display in which texture gradients, linear perspective of the surface contours, and relative height in the visual field provided information that two objects were at different distances. Five- and…

In the present study, we examined if young infants can extract information regarding the directionality of biological motion. We report that 6-month-old infants can differentiate leftward and rightward motions from a movie depicting the sagittal view of an upright human point-light walker, walking as if on a treadmill. Inversion of the stimuli…

In Experiment 1, it was investigated whether infants process facial identity and emotional expression independently or in conjunction with one another. Eight-month-old infants were habituated to two upright or two inverted faces varying in facial identity and emotional expression. Infants were tested with a habituation face, a switch face, and a…

Halberda (2003) demonstrated that 17-month-old infants, but not 14- or 16-month-olds, use a strategy known as mutual exclusivity (ME) to identify the meanings of new words. When 17-month-olds were presented with a novel word in an intermodal preferential looking task, they preferentially fixated a novel object over an object for which they already…