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Infants' Sensitivity (infant + sensitivity)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Psychology	66%

Selected Abstracts

Two-Month-Old Infants' Sensitivity to Social Contingency in Mother,Infant and Stranger,Infant Interaction

INFANCY, Issue 3 2006
Ann E. Bigelow
Two-month-old infants (N = 29) participated in face-to-face interactions with their mothers and with strangers. The contingent responsiveness for smiles and vocalizations, while attending to the partner, was assessed for each partner in both interactions. For smiles and for vocalizations, infants were less responsive to the stranger relative to the mother when the stranger's contingent responsiveness was either more contingent or less contingent than that of the mother. Results are supportive of the hypothesis that young infants develop sensitivities to levels of social contingency present in their maternal interactions, which influence their responsiveness to others. [source]

Sequence learning in infancy: the independent contributions of conditional probability and pair frequency information

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 6 2009
Stuart Marcovitch
The ability to perceive sequences is fundamental to cognition. Previous studies have shown that infants can learn visual sequences as early as 2 months of age and it has been suggested that this ability is mediated by sensitivity to conditional probability information. Typically, conditional probability information has covaried with frequency information in these studies, raising the possibility that each type of information may have contributed independently to sequence learning. The current study explicitly investigated the independent contribution of each type of information. We habituated 2.5-, 4.5-, and 8.5-month-old infants to a sequence of looming visual shapes whose ordering was defined independently by specific conditional probability relations among pair elements and by the frequency of occurrence of such pairs. During test trials, we tested infants' sensitivity to each type of information and found that both types of information independently influenced sequence learning by 4.5 months of age. [source]

Discrimination of Large and Small Numerosities by Human Infants

INFANCY, Issue 3 2004
Jennifer S. Lipton
Six experiments investigated infants' sensitivity to numerosity in auditory sequences. In prior studies (Lipton & Spelke, 2003), 6-month-old infants discriminated sequences of 8 versus 16 but not 8 versus 12 sounds, and 9-month-old infants discriminated 8 versus 12 but not 8 versus 10 sounds, when the continuous variables of rate, sound duration, and sequence duration were controlled. The current studies investigated whether infants' numerical discrimination is subject to the signature ratio limit of adults' numerosity discrimination. Four experiments at 6 and 9 months provided evidence for this signature limit, suggesting that common mechanisms underlie numerosity discrimination in infants and adults. In further experiments, infants failed to discriminate 2 versus 4 or 2 versus 3 sounds when tested under the same conditions as with large numbers. These findings accord with studies using visual-spatial arrays (e.g., Clearfield & Mix, 1999) and suggest that separate systems underlie infants' representation of small and large numerosities. [source]

Expression of negative affect during face-to-face interaction: a double video study of young infants' sensitivity to social contingency

INFANT AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2006
Hanne C. Braarud
Abstract The purpose was to assess infants' sensitivity to social contingency, taking affective state into account, during face-to-face interaction with the mother in a double video set-up. Infants' behaviour during three sequences of live face-to-face interaction were compared to two sequences where the interaction between the infant and the mother was set out of phase, by presenting either the infant or the mother with a replay of their partners' behaviour during earlier live interaction. We found a significant negative correlation between the infant's degree of negative affect and the average time of looking at the mother during the live sequences. A median split was calculated to separate the infants into a high-negative-affect group and a low-negative-affect group on the basis of their emotional responses during the experiment. The low-negative-affect infants looked significantly more at their mothers than other foci during the live but not the replay sequences, while the high-negative-affect infants did not show this difference. The results suggest that 2,4-month old infants are able to distinguish between experimental distortion of contingent aspects in live and replay sequences, but that this effect of the replay condition may not be shown by moderate to highly distressed infants. Our findings underline the importance of taking infants' emotional state into account in experiments intended to assess their capacity for intersubjective communication. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Asymmetry in the detection of shapes from shading in infants,

JAPANESE PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2008
TOMOKO IMURA
Abstract:, We investigated 3- and 4-month-old infants' sensitivity to differences defined by shading using a paired-comparison familiarity/novelty preference procedure. Infants were familiarized with a pair of displays consisting of homogeneous shaded disks, and then were tested with two displays: the familiar display and a novel one containing shaded disks with reversed polarity (defined as the target). Experiment 1 examined two assumptions on discerning shapes from shading in infants by manipulating the orientations in the shading gradient of stimuli. When the orientation of the shading gradient was vertical, 4-month-old infants looked at the novel display for a longer time during the test trial. However, they failed to detect differences when the orientation of shading gradients was horizontal. Three-month-old infants did not detect differences in either orientation of the shading gradient. Experiment 2 examined asymmetry in the detection of convex versus concave shapes. Four-month-old infants failed to detect the target when the orientation of the shading grating was vertical and the target was convex. Taken with the results of Experiment 1, concave shapes were much easier to detect than convex shapes for 4-month-olds. This asymmetry suggests that 4-month-old infants process shading information in the same manner as adults. [source]