Nine- to 16-month-old infants explored pairs of novel toys in 2 conditions: violated expectation, in which the first toy produced an interesting nonobvious property and the second toy did not; and interest control, in which neither toy produced the interesting property. Infants persistently attempted to reproduce the interesting property in the…

The effects of practice on 2 elementary neuromotor patterns, stepping and sitting, were investigated in 32 6-week-old male infants. After 7 weeks, infants who received elicitation of the stepping pattern, alone or in combination with sitting exercises, stepped more than infants who received no exercise or sitting exercise only. (MDM)

Four experiments examined exogenous orienting in 3.5-month-olds. Found that sensitivity to a small moving bar was lower when most of the red bars were in the visual field contra-lateral to this probe. The distribution of color within the visual field biased attention, making it either more or less likely that the infant detected a moving stimulus.…

Examined maternal reports to determine relationship between parent-infant bed sharing and 2- to 4-month-olds' behavior. Found that 85.8% of infants slept alone; the rest slept with either one or both parents. Solitary sleepers had more positive mood and were more persistent than cosleepers, even with potential confounders controlled. Infants…

Used a modified visual-fixation-based auditory-preference procedure to test preferences for infant-directed singing versus adult-directed singing in 15 two-day-old hearing infants of deaf parents. Subjects heard a Japanese and an English play song. Found that infants prefer infant-directed singing over adult-directed singing and that the…

Presents suggested play activities for parents to do with infants from birth to 12 months that stimulate the infant's senses, encourage exploration, and satisfy security needs. Activities, games, and songs are described for birth to 2 months, 3 to 6 months, 6 to 9 months, and 10 to 12 months. (KB)

Examined behavioral/physiological responses of 2-month-olds during physical examinations. Found that colic infants cried twice as much, cried more intensely, and were more inconsolable than control infants. Heart rate, vagal tone, and cortisol measures showed no appreciable difference. At home, colic infants displayed a blunted rhythm in cortisol…

Tested whether 7-month-olds' means-end behaviors were genuine or the repetition of trained behaviors under conditions of greater arousal. Found that infants' learned button-pushing to light a set of distant lights differed from button-pushing to retrieve toys. Infants demonstrated means-end skills with behaviors that they had not been trained to…

Recent research on infants' responses to occlusion and containment events indicates that, although some violations of the continuity principle are detected at an early age e.g. Aguiar, A., & Baillargeon, R. (1999). 2.5-month-old infants' reasoning about when objects should and should not be occluded. Cognitive Psychology 39, 116-157; Hespos, S.…

Work with infants on the "visual cliff" links avoidance of drop-offs to experience with self-produced locomotion. Adolph's (2002) research on infants' perception of slope and gap traversability suggests that learning to avoid falling down is highly specific to the postural context in which it occurs. Infants, for example, who have…

Do 9-month-old infants motorically simulate actions they perceive others perform? Two experiments tested whether action observation, like overt reaching, is sufficient to elicit the Piagetian A-not-B error. Infants recovered a toy hidden at location A or observed an experimenter recover the toy. After the toy was hidden at location B, infants in…

Shaken baby syndrome describes the serious injuries that can occur when a very young child is severely or violently shaken, causing the brain to move back and forth inside the skull. The syndrome usually originates when a parent or other caregiver shakes a baby out of anger or frustration, often because the baby would not stop crying or…

This study examined changes in infants' performance in detecting tones as a funtion of time. Stimuli were presented in blocks of fixed frequency and intensity, rather than in random order. The findings of earlier studies that an observer can reliably tell from a 1-month-old's behavior when a pure tone is being presented, and that reinforcement of…

Infants' responses to male and female faces and their preferences for happy versus fearful faces were studied to extend findings indicating that infants at 7 months can generalize discrimination between expressions of happiness and surprise across four different female models' faces. In the first experiment, a paired-comparison procedure was used…

Reports three experiments in infant visual perception which studied the processes underlying infants' shifts of fixation from one object to another. (JMB)