Previous work demonstrated that 9-month-olds who were familiarized with 3-syllable strings consistent with both a broader (AAB or ABA) and narrower (AA"di" or A"di"A) generalization made only the latter. Because the narrower generalization is a subset of the broader one, any example that is consistent with the broader generalization but not the…

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…

Despite a large literature on infants' memory for visually presented stimuli, the processes underlying visual memory are not well understood. Two studies with 4-month-olds (N = 60) examined the effects of providing opportunities for comparison of items on infants' memory for those items. Experiment 1 revealed that 4-month-olds failed to show…

Wise teachers of infants and toddlers know how concerned, helpful, empathic, cooperative, and friendly--that is, how prosocial--very young children can be. Teachers see older infants crawl or toddle over to "friends" arriving later in the morning and greet them as if they had not seen them in weeks. Teachers and families know that these young…

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…

The present study investigated the brain mechanisms involved during young children's receptive familiarization with new words, and whether the dynamics of these mechanisms are related to the child's productive vocabulary size. To this end, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 20-month-old children in a pseudoword repetition task.…

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…

The present study applied a preferential looking paradigm to test whether 6- and 9-month old infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement. The target object was a cup with the handle rotated either towards or away from the actor. In two experiments, infants saw the video of an actor's grasping movement…

A number of studies have investigated infants' abilities to extract and discriminate number from multimodal events. These results have been mixed for several possible reasons, including aspects of the experimental design that provide perceptual cues that are unrelated to number, and are known to influence looking preferences. This experiment used…

In the last 10 years, over 80% of adults surveyed report some familiarity with Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) and the dangers of shaking infants younger than 2 years of age ([Dias et al., 2005] and [Russell and Britner, 2006]). Hence, in the context of SBS prevention, the question of whether caregivers knew the safety risks of shaking an infant…

We investigated whether 1-year-old infants use their shared experience with an adult to determine the meaning of a pointing gesture. In the first study, after two adults had each shared a different activity with the infant, one of the adults pointed to a target object. Eighteen- but not 14-month-olds responded appropriately to the pointing gesture…

Electrophysiological work in nonhuman primates has established the existence of multiple types of signals in the temporal lobe that contribute to recognition memory, including information regarding a stimulus's relative novelty, familiarity, and recency of occurrence. We used high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether young…

The current study examined the effects of institutionalization on the discrimination of facial expressions of emotion in three groups of 42-month-old children. One group consisted of children abandoned at birth who were randomly assigned to Care-as-Usual (institutional care) following a baseline assessment. Another group consisted of children…

This study examines the role of functional morphemes in the earliest stage of lexical development. Recent research showed that prelinguistic infants can perceive functional morphemes. We inquire whether infants use frequent functors to segment potential word forms. French-learning 8-month-olds were familiarized to two utterance types: a novel noun…