Investigates infant behavior with respect to the development of object permanance. Nine-month-old infants were presented with a problem in which they saw an object hidden in one of two places but were prevented from searching for it until after the spatial relationship between infant and object was changed in some way. (Author/SS)

A series of experiments demonstrated that sharing was a characteristic activity of children 18 months of age and younger. (SB)

Preterm and term infants were given a sucrose solution, a glucose solution, or water during a test period in which the amount of their crying was measured. Sucrose reduced crying in preterm and term infants by 91% and 93%, respectively, and glucose by 86% and 81%, respectively. Water was ineffective in reducing crying in both preterm and term…

Investigated the responses of 57 infants to breast and axillary odors produced by lactating females. Two-week-old bottle-fed girls responded preferentially to the breast odor of a nursing woman when it was paired with the woman's axillary odors or odors from a nonparturient female. (RJC)

Studied reaching movements by groups of infants of 4.5, 6, and 7.5 months. At all ages, initial direction of movement was correlated with target direction. This result provided evidence that hand was aimed toward target. Changes in movement direction tended to curve hand path toward target. This result provided evidence of error correction. (RH)

In the first study, 3-, 6-, and 9- month-olds' behavior was assessed as a stranger broke contact to stare at the infant, to look at a wall, or to look at another person. Regardless of age and the reason contact was broken, the still-face reaction did not depend on the experimenter's intention. In the second study, 3-, 6-, and 9-month-olds…

Infants expect objects to be solid and cohesive, and to move on continuous paths through space. In this study, we examine whether infants understand that human beings are material objects, subject to these same principles. We report that 5-month-old infants apply the constraint of continuous motion to inanimate blocks, but not to people. This…

Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a…

Research in the area of infant development has endless facets of investigation. No one facet of research is more important than another, and all of the findings work in a synchronous fashion to facilitate our understanding of child development. Research on child development has proliferated across the centuries. Infant characteristics like…

The current study distinguishes between attributions of goal-directed perception (i.e. attention) and non-goal-directed perception to examine 9-month-olds' interpretation of others' head and eye turns. In a looking time task, 9-month-olds encoded the relationship between an actor's head and eye turns and a target object if the head and eye turns…

The relationship between infants' performance on a Piagetian scale between the ages of 12 and 24 months and the infants' scores on the Stanford-Binet at the age of 31 months was assessed. (JMB)

Although previous research with adult humans and nonhumans has suggested a relationship between sleep behavior and brain serotonin levels, no studies have been made of the relationship of normal children's or infants' sleep patterns to serotonin levels, tryptophan metabolism, or diet. This study investigates the relationship between dietary…

Research supported largely by grant HD-02296 from the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Public Health Service.

This paper reports on a 3-month longitudinal study comparing the crying behavior of a group of babies delivered by the "nonviolent" Leboyer method with a control group delivered by traditional methods. Subjects were 24 white, middle class infants delivered by minimally medicated, multiparous and primiparous mothers. Fourteen newborns…

Results show that at eight months of age ability to identify the site of an event after reorientation is based on the spatial relationship between the event and environmental features. The latter include features associated with room shape as well as a landmark at the site of the event. (Author/RH)