From about 7 months of age onward, infants start to reliably fixate the goal of an observed action, such as a grasp, before the action is complete. The available research has identified a variety of factors that influence such goal-anticipatory gaze shifts, including the experience with the shown action events and familiarity with the observed…

Purpose: Developmental functional modules (DFMs) are biological modules that are defined by their structural (morphological), functional, or developmental elements, and, in some cases, all three of these. This review article considers the hypothesis that vocal development in the first year of life can be understood in large part with respect to…

Emerging findings from studies with infants at familial high risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), owing to an older sibling with a diagnosis, suggest that those who go on to develop ASD show early impairments in the processing of stimuli with both social and non-social content. Although ASD is defined by social-communication impairments and…

Newborn infants appear to possess an innate bias that guides preferential orienting to and tracking of human faces. There is, however, no clear agreement as to the underlying mechanism supporting such a preference. In particular, two competing theories (known as the "structural" and "sensory" hypotheses) conjecture fundamentally different biasing…

This paper seeks to foster a discussion on whether experiments with robots can inform theory in infant motor development and specifically (1) how the interactions among the parts of a system, including the nervous and musculoskeletal systems and the forces acting on the body, induce organizational changes in the whole, and (2) how exploratory…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate generalized imitation of manual gestures in 1- to 2-year-old infants. In Experiment 1, 6 infants were first trained four baseline matching relations (e.g., when instructed "Do this," to raise their arms after they saw the experimenter do so). Next, four novel gestures that the infants did not match in…

We present a computational model that learns a coupling between motor parameters and their sensory consequences in vocal production during a babbling phase. Based on the coupling, preferred motor parameters and prototypically perceived sounds develop concurrently. Exposure to an ambient language modifies perception to coincide with the sounds from…

Highlighting current literature concerning infants' ability to perceive motion, this paper discusses the sensory apparatus that makes motion perception possible. Reviews of the physiology, anatomy, and sensory capabilities of the infant's visual system, as well as a discussion of the neural physiological mechanisms that govern the visual system,…

Findings indicate that high-risk infants are not exposed to greater exogenous stress during the prenatal and perinatal periods, although subsequent caregiving provided by disturbed mothers may not be optimal. Several findings point to the existence of a constitutionally vulnerable subgroup of high-risk infants. (Author/RH)