This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

Infant research is providing accumulating evidence that number-space mappings appear early in development. Here, a Posner cueing paradigm was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning the attentional bias induced by nonsymbolic numerical cues in 9-month-old infants (N = 32). Event-related potentials and saccadic reaction time were…

This study examined behavioral, heart rate (HR), and event-related potential (ERP) correlates of attention and recognition memory for 4.5-, 6-, and 7.5-month-old infants (N = 45) during stimulus encoding. Attention was utilized as an independent variable using HR measures. The Nc ERP component associated with attention and the late slow wave (LSW)…

Prior research suggests that infants' action production affects their action understanding, but little is known about the aspects of motor experience that render these effects. In Study 1, the relative contributions of self-produced (n = 30) and observational (n = 30) action experience on 3-month-old infants' action understanding was…

Visual information influences speech perception in both infants and adults. It is still unknown whether lexical representations are multisensory. To address this question, we exposed 18-month-old infants (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) to new word-object pairings: Participants either heard the acoustic form of the words or saw the talking face in…

Comparisons of cognitive processing in monolinguals and bilinguals have revealed a bilingual advantage in inhibitory control. Recent studies have demonstrated advantages associated with exposure to two languages in infancy. However, the domain specificity and scope of the infant bilingual advantage in infancy remains unclear. In the present study,…

This study examined differences in visual attention as a function of label learning from 6 to 9 months of age. Before and after 3 months of parent-directed storybook training with computer-generated novel objects, event-related potentials and visual fixations were recorded while infants viewed trained and untrained images (n = 23). Relative to a…

Adults recognize emotions conveyed by bodies with comparable accuracy to facial emotions. However, no prior study has explored infants' perception of body emotions. In Experiment 1, 6.5-month-olds (n = 32) preferred happy over neutral actions of actors with covered faces in upright but not inverted silent videos. In Experiment 2, infants…

Two experiments demonstrate that 5-month-olds are sensitive to local redundancy in visual-temporal sequences. In Experiment 1, 20 infants saw 2 separate sequences of looming colored shapes that possessed the same elements but contrasting transitional probabilities. One sequence was random whereas the other was based on bigrams. Without any prior…

Sixty infants divided evenly between 5 and 7 months of age were tested for their knowledge of object continuity versus discontinuity with a predictive tracking task. The stimulus event consisted of a moving ball that was briefly occluded for 20 trials. Both age groups predictively tracked the ball when it disappeared and reappeared via occlusion,…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were utilized in an investigation of 21 six-month-olds' attention to and processing of global and local properties of hierarchical patterns. Overall, infants demonstrated an advantage for processing the overall configuration (i.e., global properties) of local features of hierarchical patterns; however,…

A growing body of research indicates connections exist between action, perception, and cognition in infants. In this study, associated changes between sitting ability and upright face processing were tested in 111 infants. Using the visual habituation "switch" task (C. H. Cashon & L. B. Cohen, 2004; L. B. Cohen & C. H. Cashon, 2001), holistic…

Two experiments examined infants' ability to form a spatial category when habituated to few (only 2) or many (6) exemplars of a spatial relation. Sixty-four infants of 10 months and 64 infants of 14 months were habituated to dynamic events in which a toy was placed in a consistent spatial relation ("in" or "on") to a referent…

In the world, the manners and paths of motion events take place together, but in language, these features are expressed separately. How do infants learn to process motion events in linguistically appropriate ways? Forty-six English-learning 7- to 9-month-olds were habituated to a motion event in which a character performed both a manner and a…

This article presents an eye-tracking study using a novel combination of visual saliency maps and "area-of-interest" analyses to explore online feature extraction during category learning in infants. Category learning in 12-month-olds (N = 22) involved a transition from looking at high-saliency image regions to looking at more…