This research examined how 5-, 8-, and 11-month-olds with female primary caregivers mentally represented faces using a familiarization procedure similar to real-world experience in which infants have greater exposure to female faces aged 21-39 years than other face types. We predicted infants would form weighted representations of faces (i.e.,…

Between 6 and 9 months, while infant's ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group is maintained, discrimination of faces within other-race groups declines to a point where 9-month-old infants fail to discriminate other-race faces. Such face perception narrowing can be overcome in various ways at 9 or 12 months of age, such as…

In human children and adults, familiar face types--typically own-age and own-species faces--are discriminated better than other face types; however, human infants do not appear to exhibit an own-age bias but instead better discriminate adult faces, which they see more often. There are two possible explanations for this pattern: Perceptual…

Although human infants demonstrate early competence to retain visual information, memory capacities during infancy remain largely undocumented. In three experiments, we used a Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) task to examine abilities to encode identity (Experiment 1) and spatial properties (Experiments 2a and 2b) of unfamiliar complex visual…

Six-month-old infants' ("N" = 168) memory for individual items in a categorized list (e.g., images of dogs or cats) was examined to investigate the interactions between visual recognition memory, working memory, and categorization. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with six different cats or dogs, presented one at a time…

Bhatt and Quinn (2011) review the substantial evidence that learning constrains perceptual organization in infants. With those findings as a foundation, they discuss five kinds of experiences that engender learning in infants and propose that attention and unitization mediate infant learning. Bhatt and Quinn's article is informative--the ideas…

Adults across cultures speak to infants in a specific infant-directed manner. We asked whether infants use this manner of speech (infant- or adult-directed) to guide their subsequent visual preferences for social partners. We found that 5-month-old infants encode an individuals' use of infant-directed speech and adult-directed speech, and use this…

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…

Six-month-olds reliably discriminate different monkey and human faces whereas 9-month-olds only discriminate different human faces. It is often falsely assumed that perceptual narrowing reflects a permanent change in perceptual abilities. In 3 experiments, ninety-six 12-month-olds' discrimination of unfamiliar monkey faces was examined. Following…

In this study, 4-month-old infants' and adults' spontaneous preferences for emotional and neutral displays with direct and averted gaze are investigated using visual preference paradigms. Specifically, by presenting two approach-oriented emotions (happiness and anger) and two avoidance-oriented emotions (fear and sadness), we asked whether the…

The ability to individuate objects is one of our most fundamental cognitive capacities. Recent research has revealed that when objects vary in color or luminance alone, infants fail to individuate those objects until 11.5 months. However, color and luminance frequently covary in the natural environment, thus providing a more salient and reliable…

This study compared 3- to 4-month-olds' recognition of previously unfamiliar faces learned in a moving or a static condition. Infants in the moving condition showed successful recognition with only 30 s familiarization, even when different images of a face were used in the familiarization and test phase (Experiment 1). In contrast, infants in the…

Novelty seeking is viewed as adaptive, and novelty preferences in infancy predict cognitive performance into adulthood. Yet 7-month-olds prefer familiar stimuli to novel ones when searching for hidden objects, in contrast to their strong novelty preferences with visible objects (Shinskey & Munakata, 2005). According to a graded representations…

Previous psychophysical studies have shown that the adult human visual system makes use of form information such as occlusion to determine whether to integrate or segregate local motion signals (J. McDermott, Y. Weiss, & E. H. Adelson, 2001). Using the displays developed by McDermott et al., these experiments examined whether occlusion and amodal…

Two experiments examined the effects of multimodal presentation and stimulus familiarity on auditory and visual processing. In Experiment 1, 10-month-olds were habituated to either an auditory stimulus, a visual stimulus, or an auditory-visual multimodal stimulus. Processing time was assessed during the habituation phase, and discrimination of…