Learning about one’s physical environment is an important task that must be accomplished early in life to be able to successfully navigate and operate. In an attempt to explain infants’ great success in this endeavor at such an early age, it has been proposed that infants are ready-equipped with some basic knowledge of physics. However, it is also possible that infants possess powerful learning...

Infants follow the gaze direction of others from the middle of the first year of life. In attempting to determine how infants understand the looking behavior of adults, a number of recent studies have blocked the adult's line of sight in some way (e.g. with a blindfold or with a barrier). In contrast, in the current studies an adult looked behind a barrier which blocked the child's line of sigh...

Is infant looking behavior in ambiguous situations best described in terms of information seeking (social referencing) or as attachment behavior? Twelve-month-old infants were assigned to 1 of 2 conditions (Study 1); each infant’s mother provided positive information about an ambiguous toy and an experimenter provided positive information. In Study 2, 12-month-old infants were assigned to 1 of ...

OBJECTIVE Infants and toddlers with cystic fibrosis (CF) are at risk for poor growth. Controlled behavioral assessment studies have not focused on this population. This study compared calorie intake, percentage of Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) per day and per kilogram, and percentage of calories from fat, protein, and carbohydrates between infants and toddlers with CF and healthy peers. Als...

Infants’ responses in speech sound discrimination tasks can be nonmonotonic over time. Stager and Werker (1997) reported such data in a bimodal habituation task. In this task, 8-month-old infants were capable of discriminations that involved minimal contrast pairs, whereas 14-month-old infants were not. It was argued that the older infants’ attenuated performance was linked to their processing ...

The ability to construe ourselves and others as agents with minds having mental states such as perceptions, attention, desires and beliefs, is critical to humans' social, linguistic, and cognitive competence. When and how this ability becomes available to us during development is therefore of particular theoretical importance. Historically, most work in this area has concentrated on the ability...

Using a means-means-ends problem-solving task, this study examined whether 16-month-old walking infants (N = 28) took into account the width of a bridge as a means for crossing a precipice and the location of a handrail as a means for augmenting balance on a narrow bridge. Infants were encouraged to cross from one platform to another over narrow and wide bridges located at various distances fro...