Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a noninvasive neuroimaging technique that could be uniquely effective for investigating cortical function in human infants. However, prior efforts have been hampered by the difficulty of aligning arrays of fNIRS optodes placed on the scalp to anatomical or functional regions of underlying cortex.…

Saccade latency is widely used across infant psychology to investigate infants' understanding of events. Interpreting particular latency values requires knowledge of standard saccadic RTs, but there is no consensus as to typical values. This study provides standard estimates of infants' (n = 194, ages 9 to 15 months) saccadic RTs under a range of…

Infants' preference for faces was investigated in a cross-sectional sample of 75 children, aged 3 to 11 months, and 23 adults. A visual preference paradigm was used where pairs of faces and toys were presented side-by-side while eye gaze was recorded. In addition, motor activity was assessed via parent report and the relation between motor…

When face processing studies find sex differences, male infants appear better at face recognition than female infants, whereas female adults appear better at face recognition than male adults. Both female infants and adults, however, discriminate emotional expressions better than males. To investigate if sex and age differences in facial scanning…

Two experiments examined the effects of changes in adult eye direction during both televised and live contingent interaction with infants 3 to 6 months of age. Infants' smiling declined whenever adults looked away, supporting the hypothesis that infants express their cognitive appreciation of the adults' eye direction by their affective behavior.…

Thirty-two three-month-old infants participated in two experiments showing color videotapes of facial stimuli in a paired comparison format. Suggests that contrast in effect of eye contact availability and rather subtle stimulus motion (blinking) implies that three-month-old infants are comparatively insensitive to being the object of another's…

Three experiments used a visual fixation technique to examine whether toddlers interpret speech continuously. Found that 24-month-olds had delayed responses when a competing distractor picture's label overlapped phonetically with the target at onset, but not when the pictures' labels rhymed, showing that children monitored speech stream…

Evaluated role of visual input during reaching and grasping. Found that both infants and adults completed a reach and grasp to a darkened object but used vision when object remained visible. Infants contacted the object more often when it remained visible, although with longer durations and more movement units. Adults reached faster and more…

Examines evidence that the research community studying infants' object concept and the community concerned with adult object-based attention have been studying the same natural kind. Maintains that the discovery that the object representations of young infants are the same as the object files of mid-level visual cognition has implications for both…