Self-propelled motion is a powerful cue that conveys information that an object is animate. In this case, animate refers to an entity's capacity to initiate motion without an applied external force. Sensitivity to this motion cue is present in infants that are a few months old, but whether this sensitivity is experience-dependent or is already…

Infants as young as 2 months can integrate audio and visual aspects of speech articulation. A shift of attention from the eyes towards the mouth of talking faces occurs around 6 months of age in monolingual infants. However, it is unknown whether this pattern of attention during audiovisual speech processing is influenced by speech and language…

The infant brain may be predisposed to identify perceptually salient cues that are common to both signed and spoken languages. Recent theory based on spoken languages has advanced sonority as one of these potential language acquisition cues. Using a preferential looking paradigm with an infrared eye tracker, we explored visual attention of hearing…

The current study examined the relations between individual differences in attention to emotion faces and temperamental negative affect across the first 2 years of life. Infant studies have noted a normative pattern of preferential attention to salient cues, particularly angry faces. A parallel literature suggests that elevated attention bias to…

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…

We investigated longitudinal relations among gaze following and face scanning in infancy and later language development. At 12 months, infants watched videos of a woman describing an object while their passive viewing was measured with an eye-tracker. We examined the relation between infants' face scanning behavior and their tendency to follow the…

The Japanese language has single/geminate obstruents characterized by durational difference in closure/frication as part of the phonemic repertoire used to distinguish word meanings. We first evaluated infants' abilities to discriminate naturally uttered single/geminate obstruents (/pata/ and /patta/) using the visual habituation-dishabituation…

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…

Four experiments investigated infants' preferences for age-appropriate and age-inappropriate infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Two initial experiments showed that 6-, 10-, and 14-month-olds preferred IDS directed toward younger infants, and 4-, 8-, 10-, and 14-month-olds, but not 6-month-olds, preferred IDS directed…

When are the precursors of ordinal numerical knowledge first evident in infancy? Brannon (2002) argued that by 11 months of age, infants possess the ability to appreciate the greater than and less than relations between numerical values but that this ability experiences a sudden onset between 9 and 11 months of age. Here we present 5 experiments…

In the studies presented here, infants' understanding of others' attention was assessed when gaze direction cues were not diagnostic. Fourteen-, 18- and 24-month-olds witnessed an adult look to the side of an object and express excitement. In 1 experimental condition this object was new for the adult because she was not present while the child and…

Nine- and 16-month-old infants were presented a manual search problem in which a toy was hidden in one of two inaccessible containers, which were then moved into reach. Older infants performed better than younger infants, performance improved across trials, and more correct searches occurred when containers or trajectories were distinctive.…

Two experiments examined the origins of joint visual attention in 6- to 11-month-olds with a training procedure. Results indicated that joint visual attention does not reliably appear prior to 10 months; from about 8 months, a gaze-following response can be learned; and simple learning is not sufficient as the mechanism through which joint…

Three experiments examined 4- to 10-month-olds' perception of audio-visual (A-V) temporal synchrony cues in the presence or absence of rhythmic pattern cues. Results established that infants of all ages could discriminate between two different audio-visual rhythmic events. Only 10-month-olds detected a desynchronization of the auditory and visual…

Explored 14- and 18-month olds' ability to identify the target of the experimenter's emotional display of happiness or disgust in response to something seen or felt inside a box. Findings suggested that, regardless of age, infants used the experimenter's attentional cues to interpret her emotional signals and behaved as if they understood that she…