In 2004, McMurray and Aslin edited for "Infancy" a special section on eye tracking. The articles in that special issue revealed the enormous promise of automatic eye tracking with young infants and demonstrated that eye-tracking procedures can provide significant insight into the emergence of cognitive, social, and emotional processing in infancy.…

In two experiments, it was investigated how preverbal infants perceive the relationship between a person and an object she is looking at. More specifically, it was examined whether infants interpret an adult's object-directed gaze as a marker of an intention to act or whether they relate the person and the object via a mechanism of associative…

Recent research has demonstrated that infants' attention towards novel objects is affected by an adult's emotional expression and eye gaze toward the object. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated how infants at 3, 6, and 9 months of age process fearful compared to neutral faces looking toward objects or averting gaze away…

Theory of mind was assessed in 32 adults with HFA, 29 adults with Asperger syndrome and 32 neurotypical adults. The HFA and Asperger syndrome groups were impaired in performance of the Strange stories test and the Faux-pas test and reported more theory of mind problems than the neurotypical adults. The three groups did not differ in performance of…

The importance of eye gaze as a means of communication is indisputable. However, there is debate about whether there is a dedicated neural module, which functions as an eye gaze detector and when infants are able to use eye gaze cues in a referential way. The application of neuroscience methodologies to developmental psychology has provided new…

To test the hypothesis that biological motion perception is developmentally integrated with important social cognitive abilities, 12-month-olds (N = 36) were shown a display of a human point-light figure turning to observe a target. Infants spontaneously and reliably followed the figure's "gaze" despite the absence of familiar and socially…

Infants represent the acts of others and their own acts in commensurate terms. They can recognize cross-modal equivalences between acts they see others perform and their own felt bodily movements. This recognition of self-other equivalences in action gives rise to interpreting others as having similar psychological states such as perceptions and…

We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill--as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of…

Aims: To compare siblings of children with autism (SIBS-A) and siblings of children with typical development (SIBS-TD) at 4 and 14 months of age. Methods: At 4 months, mother-infant interactional synchrony during free play, infant gaze and affect during the still-face paradigm, and infant responsiveness to a name-calling paradigm were examined (n…