This study examined the effects of program pacing, defined as the rate of scene and character change per minute, on infants' visual attention to video presentations. Seventy-two infants (twenty-four 6-month-olds, twenty-four 9-month-olds, twenty-four 12-month-olds) were exposed to one of two sets of high- and low-paced commercial infant DVDs. Each…

Background: Anxiety aggregates in families. Environmental factors, such as modelling of anxious behaviours, are assumed to play a causal role in the development of child anxiety. We investigated the predictive value of paternal and maternal anxiety (lifetime anxiety disorders and expressed parental anxiety) on infants' fear and avoidance during…

In this article we argue that current theories on socioemotional development during infancy need to be reconceptualized in order to account for cross-cultural variation in caregiver-infant interaction. In line with the cultural-historical internalization theory of emotional development (Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2006) and the ecocultural model of…

Infants can track small groups of solid objects, and infants can respond when these quantities change. But earlier work is equivocal about whether infants can track continuous substances, such as piles of sand. Experiment 1 ("N" = 88) used a habituation paradigm to show infants can register changes in the size of piles of sand that they…

In this study, we addressed the question of the nature of the information needed by 13-month-old infants to understand another agent's intentions. In two experiments, an experimenter was either unable or unwilling to give a toy to an infant. Importantly, an implement (a gutter in which the toy could roll down toward the infant) was used to make…

The present eye-tracking study aimed to investigate the impact of auditory speech information on 12-month-olds' gaze behavior to silently-talking faces. We examined German infants' face-scanning behavior to side-by-side presentation of a bilingual speaker's face silently speaking German utterances on one side and French on the other side, before…

Recent research suggests that 9-month-old infants tested in a modified version of the A-not-B search task covertly imitate actions performed by the experimenter. The current study examines whether infants also simulate actions performed by mechanical devices, and whether this varies with whether or not they have been familiarized with the devices…

Differences in infant distress and regulatory behaviors based on the quality of attachment to mother, emotion context (frustration versus fear), and whether or not mothers were actively involved in the emotion-eliciting tasks were examined in a sample of ninety-eight 16-month-old infants and their mothers. Dyads participated in the Strange…

This study investigates the importance of object function (action-object-outcome relations) on object individuation in infancy. Five experiments examined the ability of 9.5- and 12-month-old infants to individuate simple geometric objects in a manual search design. Experiments 1 through 4 (12-month-olds, N = 128) provided several combinations of…

In neurotypical infants, genetically-specified attachment/attention mechanisms underpin the motivation to interact, which enables the acquisition of socio-cultural norms for language and accounts for the efficacy of socialization processes (Lee et al., 2009; Schumann, 2013). In children with autism, as in second language acquisition,…

Case study research methodology was used to describe the play behaviors of three infants at 12 months of age, who were later diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Data included standardized test scores, and analyses of video footage of semi-structured play sessions from infants identified as high risk for autism, because of having a sibling…

This paper presents the psychometric properties of the Polish version of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire&-Revised (IBQ-R). A group of 396 pairs of parents was studied, and a 3-factor structure of IBQ-R emerged with differences comparing to the original U.S. sample and a prior replication Russian sample. Analyses demonstrated satisfactory…

Mechanisms were examined to clarify relations between maternal depressive symptoms, dysfunctional cognitions, and infant night waking among 45 infants (1-24 months) and their mothers. A mother-driven mediational model was tested in which maternal depressive symptoms and dysfunctional cognitions about infant sleep predicted infant night waking via…

Pamela High, MS, MD, co-director of the Infant Behavior, Cry and Sleep Clinic at the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, discusses the phenomena of infant crying and the impact it has on families. In most cases, infant crying will peak and resolve in the early months, but infant irritability can increase the risk of maternal…

How do young children direct their attention to other people in the natural world? Although many studies have examined the perception of faces and of goal-directed actions, relatively little work has focused on what children will look at in complex and unconstrained viewing environments. To address this question, we showed videos of objects,…