The cognitive mechanisms and benefits of active learning in early child development are poorly understood. The current study investigated 20-23-month-old infants' curiosity-driven information selection in a novel word learning task, designed to identify any potential advantage for active learning over passive learning. In a gaze-contingent…

Visual attention develops rapidly across the first postnatal year, from reflexive eye movements driven by low-level stimulus properties to increasingly voluntary eye movements influenced by higher-order factors. To test the hypothesis that development reflects guidance by increasingly abstract features, we used representational similarity analysis…

Sustained attention (SA) is an endogenous form of attention that emerges in infancy and reflects cognitive engagement and processing. SA is critical for learning and has been measured using different methods during screen-based and interactive contexts involving social and nonsocial stimuli. How SA differs by measurement method, context, and…

Studies in low-resource settings suggest that multiple aspects of early childhood development are sensitive to the relative poverty of a child's environment. We examined whether direct, quantitative measures of early developing cognitive functions show a similar association with relative poverty. Eye movement latencies were recorded in children at…

Adults use both bottom-up sensory inputs and top-down signals to generate predictions about future sensory inputs. Infants have also been shown to make predictions with simple stimuli and recent work has suggested top-down processing is available early in infancy. However, it is unknown whether this indicates that top-down prediction is an ability…

Bilingualism has been observed to influence cognitive processing across the lifespan but whether bilingual environments have an effect on selective attention and attention strategies in infancy remains an unresolved question. In Study 1, infants exposed to monolingual or bilingual environments participated in an eye-tracking cueing task in which…

Two experiments examined whether 4-month-olds (n = 120) who were induced to assign two objects to different categories would then be able to take advantage of these contrastive categorical encodings to individuate and track the objects. In each experiment, infants first watched functional demonstrations of two tools, a masher and tongs (Experiment…

Children learn their earliest words through social "interaction," but it is unknown how much they rely on social "information." Some theories argue that word learning is fundamentally social from its outset, with even the youngest infants understanding intentions and using them to infer a social partner's target of reference.…

There has been considerable variability within the literature concerning the extent to which deaf/hard of hearing individuals are able to process phonological codes during reading. Two experiments are reported in which participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing correctly spelled words (e.g., church),…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences (["la petite 'ferme'"] ["est très jolie"] "the small farm is very…

In their first years, infants acquire an incredible amount of information regarding the objects present in their environment. While often it is not clear what specific information should be prioritized in encoding from the many characteristics of an object, different types of object representations facilitate different types of generalizations. We…

Ideomotor theory considers bidirectional action-effect associations to be the fundamental building blocks for intentional action. The present study employed a novel pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study developmental changes in the role of action-effects in the acquisition of voluntary action. Our findings suggest that both 7- and…

Eye tracking was used to show that 18-month-old infants are sensitive to social context as a sign that others' actions are bound together as a collaborative sequence based on a joint goal. Infants observed five identical demonstrations in which Actor 1 moved a block to one location and Actor 2 moved the same block to a new location, creating…

Visual communication cues facilitate interpersonal communication. It is important that we look at faces to retrieve and subsequently process such cues. It is also important that we sometimes look away from faces as they increase cognitive load that may interfere with online processing. Indeed, when typically developing individuals hold face gaze…

Perception and eye movements are affected by culture. Adults from Eastern societies (e.g. China) display a disposition to process information "holistically," whereas individuals from Western societies (e.g. Britain) process information "analytically." Recently, this pattern of cultural differences has been extended to face…