Infants are born highly sensitive to the natural patterns found in languages. They use their perceptual sensitivity to acquire detailed information about the structure of languages in their environment. To date, most studies of infant perception and early language acquisition have investigated spoken/auditory languages and hearing infants (e.g.…

Over the last 2 centuries there has been a rapid increase in the proportion of children who grow up in cities. However, relatively little work has explored in detail the physiological and cognitive pathways through which city life may affect early development. To assess this, we observed a cohort of infants growing up in diverse settings across…

Fragmented sleep is common in infancy. Although night awakening is known to decrease with age, in some infants night awakening is more persistent and continues into older ages. However, the influence of fragmented sleep on development is poorly known. In the present study, the longitudinal relationship between fragmented sleep and psychomotor…

Although infants' cognitions about the world must be influenced by experience, little research has directly assessed the relation between everyday experience and infants' visual cognition in the laboratory. Eye-tracking procedures were used to measure 4-month-old infants' eye movements as they visually investigated a series of…

Introduction: Although recent research has focused on the effects of maternal eating disorders (EDs) on children, little is known about the effect of maternal EDs on neurobiological outcomes in newborns and infants. This study is the first to investigate neurobehavioural regulation and cognitive development in newborns and infants of mothers with…

This study examined contributions of maternal personality and infant temperament to infant vocabulary and cognitive development both directly and indirectly through parental stress. Participants were recruited at birth and included 63 infant twin pairs and their mothers. Assessments were completed at 6, 9, 12, and 18 months of age and included…

What kind of featural information do infants rely on when they are trying to recognize a previously seen object? The question of whether infants use certain features (e.g., shape or color) more than others (e.g., luminance) can only be studied legitimately if visual salience is controlled, as the magnitude of feature values--how noticeable and…

Two studies examined whether object names and functions act as cues to categories for infants. Findings indicated that both 14- and 18-month-olds were more likely to select the category match after being shown a novel category exemplar with its function than when given no additional cues. Only at 18 months did naming the objects enhance…

Three experiments investigated whether 4-month-olds would attend to and utilize the global configuration ("good form") of a partly occluded, moving object to perceive its unit and coherence behind the occluder. Results indicated that curvature per se provided information in support of completion, in addition to global configuration and…

Examined whether 6-month-olds expect people to behave differently toward persons and inanimate objects. Found that infants habituated to an actor talking to something hidden behind an occluder looked longer at an object, whereas infants habituated to an actor reaching and swiping looked longer at a person. No difference in looking at stimuli was…

The differential visual responses of 20 Down's Syndrome and 20 normal infants (CA 8 months) to 13 pairs of visual targets were compared. Although DS subjects generally looked longer at the stimuli than normal subjects, they showed a response differential in only 3 stimulus pairs compared to 11 for the normals. Six of the stimulus pairs elicited…

Investigated 4-month-olds' responsiveness to others' affective expressions in the context of a peekaboo game. Found differential patterns of visual attention and affective responsiveness to happiness/surprise, anger, fear, and sadness. Findings underscore importance of contextual information for facilitating recognition of emotion expressions and…

Five experiments used a categorization habituation-of-looking paradigm to investigate infants' categorization of animals and vehicles based on static versus dynamic attributes of stimuli (color images versus dynamic point-light displays). Findings showed that 6-month-olds categorize animals and vehicles based on static and dynamic information, and…

Two studies assessed the gaze following of 12-, 14-, and 18-month-olds. Findings indicated that infants at all ages looked at the adult's target more when the adult turned to the target with open eyes than when the adult turned with closed eyes. Additional evidence suggested that infants were not simply responding to adult head turning, but were…

Observed 12-month olds, with their mothers and independently, acting on objects from home and objects brought by the experimenter as new exemplars of previous toys. Found that conventional actions were more frequent in joint than in independent activity. In independent activity, conventional actions were more frequent with customary than with…