This paper was presented by the senior author at the Merrill-Palmer Institute Conference on Research and Teaching of Infant Development, February 13-15, 1969. (MH)

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…

Examines spontaneous temporally patterned stimulation of 17 mothers and their 3-month-old infants. Mothers used an impressive variety of temporally patterned behaviors. Factors relating to infant responsiveness contributed to the variability. (RJC)

When not socially engaged, children showed a significantly greater percentage of reoriented attention during vocalizing than nonvocalizing periods. Findings confirm the existence of an attention/vocalization relation and are consonant with Greenfield's predictions about the nature of this relation. The relation held equally for prelinguistic and…

Four experiments examined exogenous orienting in 3.5-month-olds. Found that sensitivity to a small moving bar was lower when most of the red bars were in the visual field contra-lateral to this probe. The distribution of color within the visual field biased attention, making it either more or less likely that the infant detected a moving stimulus.…

Infants' responses to male and female faces and their preferences for happy versus fearful faces were studied to extend findings indicating that infants at 7 months can generalize discrimination between expressions of happiness and surprise across four different female models' faces. In the first experiment, a paired-comparison procedure was used…

The behavioral dynamics of three different types of early mother-infant interactions were examined. Mothers were instructed to play with, imitate, and hold the attention of their infants. Frequency of vocalization, gaze direction, and smiling by both interactants, tactile play by the mother, and crying by the infant were recorded. (PCB)

Habituation to single female faces and to single geometric patterns was observed separately in two groups of infants who participated in two sessions separated by 10 days. Habituation was found to be distributed into three patterns and showed moderate but significant reliability between assessment sessions. (Author/RH)

Four-month-old infants' stimulus preferences were assessed using an operant paradigm with mobile reinforcers of different colors (blue, green). (Author/MP)

Investigates whether five-week-old infants' attention to a schematic face would increase as the velocity of its oscillating eye dots increases. Twenty-four infants served as subjects. (MP)

The early phase of imitation was studied in children between 6 and 18 months by means of the presentation of 22 actions. (SB)

Examined visual fixation in 3- to 6-month olds for fit to attentional inertia theory. Found that look duration toward extended audiovisual stimuli had a lognormal distribution. The conditional probability of looking away decreased when look duration increased. Heart rate deceleration accompanied look onset and stimulus changes occurring within…