This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

How do newborns learn to recognize objects? According to temporal learning models in computational neuroscience, the brain constructs object representations by extracting smoothly changing features from the environment. To date, however, it is unknown whether newborns depend on smoothly changing features to build invariant object representations.…

In human children and adults, familiar face types--typically own-age and own-species faces--are discriminated better than other face types; however, human infants do not appear to exhibit an own-age bias but instead better discriminate adult faces, which they see more often. There are two possible explanations for this pattern: Perceptual…

The current study aimed at investigating own- vs. other-species preferences in 3-month-old infants. The infants' eye movements were recorded during a visual preference paradigm to assess whether they show a preference for own-species faces when contrasted with other-species faces. Human and monkey faces, equated for all low-level perceptual…

This article presents an eye-tracking study using a novel combination of visual saliency maps and "area-of-interest" analyses to explore online feature extraction during category learning in infants. Category learning in 12-month-olds (N = 22) involved a transition from looking at high-saliency image regions to looking at more…

The capacity to reason about the false beliefs of others is classically considered the benchmark for a fully fledged understanding of the mental lives of others. Although much is known about the developmental origins of our understanding of others' beliefs, we still know much less about the evolutionary origins of this capacity. Here, we examine…

From birth, human infants are able to perceive a wide range of intersensory relationships. The current experiment examined whether infants between 6 months and 24 months old perceive the intermodal relationship between aggressive and nonaggressive canine vocalizations (i.e., barks) and appropriate canine facial expressions. Infants simultaneously…

Electrophysiological work in nonhuman primates has established the existence of multiple types of signals in the temporal lobe that contribute to recognition memory, including information regarding a stimulus's relative novelty, familiarity, and recency of occurrence. We used high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether young…

How do capuchin monkeys learn to use stones to crack open nuts? Perception-action theory posits that individuals explore producing varying spatial and force relations among objects and surfaces, thereby learning about affordances of such relations and how to produce them. Such learning supports the discovery of tool use. We present longitudinal…

Vidic and Haaf (2004) questioned the idea that infants use head information to categorize cats as distinct from dogs (Quinn & Eimas, 1996) and argued instead that the torso region is important. However, only null results were observed in the critical test comparisons between modified and unmodified stimuli. In addition, a priori preferences for…

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…

Human cognition is founded, in part, on four systems for representing objects, actions, number, and space. It may be based, as well, on a fifth system for representing social partners. Each system has deep roots in human phylogeny and ontogeny, and it guides and shapes the mental lives of adults. Converging research on human infants, non-human…

Infants were familiarized with plastic animals from one of two categories (land or sea) that were judged similar or variable by adults. Infants were then tested with novel animals from the same or a different category. Thirteen-month-olds in the similar familiarization condition dishabituated to novel animals of a different category and, to a…