Infants experience language in rich multisensory environments. For example, they may first be exposed to the word applesauce while touching, tasting, smelling, and seeing applesauce. In three experiments using different methods we asked whether the number of distinct senses linked with the semantic features of objects would impact word recognition…

Touch is an extraordinary sensory, communicative, and affective experience that has cascading positive effects on infants' socio-emotional development and neurobiological functioning. This study aims to explore whether maternal touch can influence infants' well-known attentional biases toward fearful facial expressions. Visual behaviour of…

The development of the ability to anticipate--as manifested by preparatory actions and neural activation related to the expectation of an upcoming stimulus--may play a key role in the ontogeny of cognitive skills more broadly. This preregistered study examined anticipatory brain potentials and behavioral responses (reaction time; RT) to…

Animal studies demonstrate that maternal touch and contact regulate infant stress, and handling during periods of maternal deprivation attenuates the stress response. To measure the effects of touch on infant stress reactivity during simulated maternal deprivation, 53 dyads were tested in two paradigms: still-face (SF) and still-face with maternal…

In three experiments (N = 48 3- to 4-year olds; 100 3- to 5-year olds; 54 4-year-olds), children who could see or feel a target toy, recognized when they had sufficient information to answer "Which one is it?" and when they needed additional access. They were weaker at taking the informative modality of access when the choice was between seeing…