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…

An investigation of 4-month-old children's attention responses to pattern dimensions and orientations by comparing the duration of an infant's fixation to changes in the orientation and structural arrangement of a previously exposed pattern. (ED)

Based on PhD dissertation submitted to the University of California, Los Angeles.

A total of 14 infants participated in this study of the recovery of visual orienting by crossmodal stimulation when no new visual information was present. The locus of the crossmodal stimulation (auditory stimulation) was discriminable to the subject. Infants in three age groups were tested on three occasions each separated by 30 days. No…

This paper introduces and gives a report of the first of a series of studies concerned with the developmental aspects of information processing. The experiments are concerned chiefly with how repeated visual encounters influence infants' attentional preference for what is familiar or unfamiliar and how infants' preference can be affected by…

Two experiments are reported in which cardiac habituation and dishabituation to pure tone stimuli were studied in well and malnourished Guatemalan infants. In both studies the magnitude of the orienting response was found to be attenuated or completely absent in infants suffering from nutritional insult. The findings were taken as evidence of a…

Male infants habituated their fixation time over trials and differentiated between the novel and familiar stimuli when the posthabituation interval was 15 seconds, but neither male nor female infants did so when the interval was 5 minutes. This paper is based upon a thesis submitted by the first author in partial fulfillment of the requirements…

Two experiments examined the effects of changes in adult eye direction during both televised and live contingent interaction with infants 3 to 6 months of age. Infants' smiling declined whenever adults looked away, supporting the hypothesis that infants express their cognitive appreciation of the adults' eye direction by their affective behavior.…

Examined effects on duration of gaze of infant- and adult-directed (ID and AD) speech signalling presentation of adult faces. Found that, when ID speech segments signaled presentation of a smiling, sad, fearful, or angry face, significant and comparable conditioning occurred with the smiling and sad faces, whereas nonsignificant and more variable…

Studied effect of attention on smooth pursuit and saccadic tracking in infants at 8, 14, 20, and 26 weeks old. Found an increase across age in overall tracking, gain of smooth-pursuit eye movements, and increased amplitude of compensatory saccades at faster tracking speeds. Findings show that development of smooth pursuit, targeted saccadic eye…

Maintains that Carpenter, Nagell, and Tomasello's (1998) data reveal little definitive information on cognitive processes involved in infants' social interactive behaviors. Evaluates support for Carpenter et al.'s claims for infant social cognition and discusses the nature of infant cognition. Maintains that what is needed is experimental evidence…

Explored relation between temperament and cardiac vagal tone in 12-week olds. Found that infants with higher baseline vagal tone showed fewer negative behaviors in the laboratory and were less disrupted by experimental procedures than infants with lower baselines. Infants who decreased cardiac vagal tone during assessments were rated by mothers as…