Sixteen 9-18 month normal/superior infants "played" in their home cribs with a two-channel operant "toy" which allowed free choice between alternate audio feedbacks. With more than 300,000 seconds of listening time in the response record, 12 babies successfully discriminated gross differences in auditory complexity, while 10 discriminated fine…

Videotapes were made of the prehensile activity and looking behavior of 2- and 5-month-old infants in the presence of objects placed within and beyond possible contact distance. (BRT)

Response and reinforcement features of operant discrimination paradigms used in audiometric assessment were investigated with normal 17-month-old children. Findings indicated more responses prior to onset of habituation when response tasks involved complex central processing skills and a twofold increase in number of subject responses when…

Four experiments assessed converging aspects of four-month-old infants' perceptions of visual patterns. Results together corroborate and extend previous findings that vertical symmetry has a special status in early perceptual development and that infants can perceive pattern wholes. (Author/AS)

Two experiments examined six-month-olds' ability to form an abstract containment category. Results indicated that, after habituation to object pairs in a containment relation, infants looked reliably longer at an example of an unfamiliar versus familiar containment relation, indicating that they could form a categorical representation of…

In three experiments, nine-month-old infants were trained to fixate on a particular feature in a pair of stimuli that varied along three dimensions. In a fourth experiment, infants were trained to fixate on a stimulus compound until reaching a learning criterion. Infants' discrimination learning under these conditions implied an ability to attend…

Habituated 180 neonates to white lights of varying luminance and tested for recovery of habituation to green, yellow, or red lights varying in excitation purity. Found that newborns discriminated chromatic stimuli from white only when excitation purity exceeded levels much higher than those for adults. Results reinforce view that neonates' vision…

Two experiments explored how infants learn to form an abstract categorical representation of support (i.e., on) when habituated to few (i.e., 2) or many (i.e., 6) examples of the relation. When habituated to 2 pairs of objects in a support relation, 14-month-olds, but not 10-month-olds, formed the abstract spatial category (i.e., generalized the…

This study investigated the relationship between perception and production in children's phonological learning to determine whether perceptual confusions could account for the patterns of substitution and deletion found in 2-year-olds' speech. A total of 14 children were presented pairs of toy stimuli, with each pair composed of a familiar item…

Measures of active sleep, quiet sleep, sucking, crying, body size and gestational age were factor analyzed for 137 normal newborns at 2 days of age. The results yielded 3 stable factors: reactivity-irritability, maturity, and reflexive and discriminative sucking. (JMB)

Two studies involving 108 infants of 6, 9, and 12 months showed that providing infants with multiple action-relevant properties elicits a rich action repertoire. (RJC)

Infants were tested for recognition and discrimination of expressions. Ten-month olds familiar with a mix of happy and surprised expressions demonstrated generalized discrimination of positive affect. Only after seven months does dependence on the presence of expression-specific features for affect recognition and discrimination diminish. (BC)

Six experiments examined infants' ability to associate nonsense words with two causal actions: pushing and pulling. Eighteen-month-olds, but not 14-month-olds, formed word-action associations. Fourteen-month-olds discriminated a change in label but not a change in action when the other was held constant. When language labels were replaced with…

Examined representation of pictorial exemplars of humans by 3- and 4-month olds. Results demonstrated an asymmetry regarding the exclusivity of categorical representations formed for humans and non-human animals. Categorical representations for humans included exemplar information, whereas categorical representation for non-human animals was based…