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Infants' Ability (infant + ability)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Psychology	42%
Humanities and Social Sciences	19%

Selected Abstracts

Sex Differences in Infants' Ability to Represent Complex Event Sequences

INFANCY, Issue 3 2004
Amy Schweinle
Prior research suggests that when very simple event sequences are used, 4.5-month-olds demonstrate the ability to individuate objects based on the continuity or disruption of their speed of motion (Wilcox & Schweinle, 2003). However, infants demonstrate their ability to individuate objects in an event-monitoring task (i.e., infants must keep track of an ongoing event) at a younger age than in an event-mapping task (i.e., infants must compare information from 2 different events). The research presented here built on these findings by examining infants' capacity to succeed on an event-mapping task with a more complex event sequence to determine if the complexity of the event interferes with their ability to form summary representations of the event, and, in short, individuate the objects. Three experiments were conducted with infants 4.5 to 9.5 months of age. The results indicated that (a) increasing the complexity of the objects' trajectories adversely affected infants' performance on the task, and (b) boys were more likely to succeed than girls. These findings shed light on how representational capacities change during the first year of life and are discussed in terms of information processing and representational capabilities as well as neuro-anatomical development. [source]

Change in action: how infants learn to walk down slopes

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 6 2009
Simone V. Gill
A critical aspect of perception,action coupling is the ability to modify ongoing actions in accordance with variations in the environment. Infants' ability to modify their gait patterns to walk down shallow and steep slopes was examined at three nested time scales. Across sessions, a microgenetic training design showed rapid improvements after the first session in infants receiving concentrated practice walking down slopes and in infants in a control group who were tested only at the beginning and end of the study. Within sessions, analyses across easy and challenging slope angles showed that infants used a ,braking strategy' to curb increases in walking speed across increasingly steeper slopes. Within trials, comparisons of infants' gait modifications before and after stepping over the brink of the slopes showed that the braking strategy was planned prospectively. Findings illustrate how observing change in action provides important insights into the process of skill acquisition. [source]

Infants' Evolving Representations of Object Motion During Occlusion: A Longitudinal Study of 6- to 12-Month-Old Infants

INFANCY, Issue 2 2004
Gustaf Gredebäck
Infants' ability to track temporarily occluded objects that moved on circular trajectories was investigated in 20 infants using a longitudinal design. They were first seen at 6 months and then every 2nd month until the end of their 1st year. Infants were presented with occlusion events covering 20% of the target's trajectory (effective occlusion interval ranged from 500,4,000 msec). Gaze was measured using an ASL 504 infrared eye-tracking system. Results effectively demonstrate that infants from 6 months of age can represent the spatiotemporal dynamics of occluded objects. Infants at all ages tested were able to predict, under certain conditions, when and where the object would reappear after occlusion. They moved gaze accurately to the position where the object was going to reappear and scaled their timing to the current occlusion duration. The average rate of predictive gaze crossings increased with occlusion duration. These results are discussed as a 2-factor process. Successful predictions are dependent on strong representations, themselves dependent on the richness of information available during encoding and graded representations. [source]

Kangaroo mother care and mother-premature infant dyadic interaction

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH JOURNAL, Issue 3 2006
Maria Anna Tallandini
The aim of this study was to investigate the psychological impact of Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) on mother-infant bonding in cases of premature delivery. Examined variables were mother-infant relationships, maternal anxiety levels, and infant interactive signals. The KMC method requires that babies be undressed and held upright between their mother's breasts for a minimum of 1 hr a day, from birth until they are discharged from hospital. The present study examined 40 premature infants and their mothers, with 21 dyads experiencing KMC and 19 receiving traditional care (TC). Maternal emotional stress was assessed with the Parent Stress Index-Short Form questionnaire (Abidin, 1990), and mother-newborn interactive style was assessed with the Nursing Child Assessment Feeding Scale (Barnard, 1975). Results revealed a better mother-infant interactive style, a significant decrease in maternal emotional stress, and better infant ability to make requests and respond to parental interactive style in the KMC group. [source]

Infant information processing and family history of specific language impairment: converging evidence for RAP deficits from two paradigms

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2007
Naseem Choudhury
An infant's ability to process auditory signals presented in rapid succession (i.e. rapid auditory processing abilities [RAP]) has been shown to predict differences in language outcomes in toddlers and preschool children. Early deficits in RAP abilities may serve as a behavioral marker for language-based learning disabilities. The purpose of this study is to determine if performance on infant information processing measures designed to tap RAP and global processing skills differ as a function of family history of specific language impairment (SLI) and/or the particular demand characteristics of the paradigm used. Seventeen 6- to 9-month-old infants from families with a history of specific language impairment (FH+) and 29 control infants (FH,) participated in this study. Infants' performance on two different RAP paradigms (head-turn procedure [HT] and auditory-visual habituation/recognition memory [AVH/RM]) and on a global processing task (visual habituation/recognition memory [VH/RM]) was assessed at 6 and 9 months. Toddler language and cognitive skills were evaluated at 12 and 16 months. A number of significant group differences were seen: FH+ infants showed significantly poorer discrimination of fast rate stimuli on both RAP tasks, took longer to habituate on both habituation/recognition memory measures, and had lower novelty preference scores on the visual habituation/recognition memory task. Infants' performance on the two RAP measures provided independent but converging contributions to outcome. Thus, different mechanisms appear to underlie performance on operantly conditioned tasks as compared to habituation/recognition memory paradigms. Further, infant RAP processing abilities predicted to 12- and 16-month language scores above and beyond family history of SLI. The results of this study provide additional support for the validity of infant RAP abilities as a behavioral marker for later language outcome. Finally, this is the first study to use a battery of infant tasks to demonstrate multi-modal processing deficits in infants at risk for SLI. [source]

Development of the infant's ability to retrieve food through a slit

INFANT AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2002
Bénédicte Achard
Abstract The main purpose of the present study is to explore infants' ability to comprehend task manipulation, and whether they can feed themselves with a spoon when food has to be retrieved through a slit in a lid placed over a plate. To access the food, the infant has to align the bowl of the spoon with the slit. The orientation of the slit is manipulated, and certain orientations require more elaborate modifications of the feeding action than others. The infants are observed at monthly intervals, from 12 to 17 months of age. The presence of the lid affects the behaviour of the infants at all ages. Some behaviours become more immature. The infants grasp the spoon with more primitive grasp configurations, they grasp the spoon less consistently at the top of the handle, and they orient the spoon less consistently, with its bowl facing upwards. These differences decrease with age. The infants also make attempts to adjust to the constraints of the task, mainly by inclining the spoon more vertically, and rotating the hand in such a way as to align the spoon with the orientation of the slit. These adjustments improve with age. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

The Effect of Maternal Depressed Mood on Infant Emotional Reaction in a Surprise-Eliciting Situation

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH JOURNAL, Issue 2 2006
Nadja Reissland
The purpose of this study is to examine the claim that an infant's ability to respond appropriately to an emotional situation varies according to the emotional state of the mother. Surprise expressions in mother and child were examined both in terms of paralinguistic aspects of surprise vocalizations as well as facial expressions. Seventy-two infants and their mothers (mean age=8 months, range=5,11 months) were video- and audiotaped in their homes. Half of the infants, matched for age and gender, had mothers who reported depressed mood. Infants of mothers with depressed mood showed significantly fewer components of facial expressions of surprise compared with infants of nondepressed mothers. Mothers with depressed mood exclaimed surprise with a significantly lower pitch (mean F0=386.13 Hz) compared to nondepressed mothers (mean F0=438.10 Hz). Furthermore, mothers with depressed mood showed fewer associations between elements of emotional expression than the nondepressed group. Infants' expressions of surprise are influenced by maternal mood, resulting in reduced expression of the emotion in infants of mothers with depressed mood. These results are discussed in terms of coordination of vocal parameters in mother,infant dyadic interaction. [source]

Four-Month-Olds' Discrimination of Optic Flow Patterns Depicting Different Directions of Observer Motion

INFANCY, Issue 2 2003
Rick O. Gilmore
One of the most powerful sources of information about spatial relationships available to mobile organisms is the pattern of visual motion called optic flow. Despite its importance for spatial perception and for guiding locomotion, very little is known about how the ability to perceive one's direction of motion, or heading, from optic flow develops early in life. In this article, we report the results of 3 experiments that tested the abilities of 4-month-old infants to discriminate optic flow patterns simulating different directions of self-motion. The combined results from 2 different experimental paradigms suggest that 4-month-olds discriminate optic flow patterns that simulate only large (> 32°) changes in the direction of the observer's motion through space. This suggests that prior to the onset of locomotion, there are limitations on infants' abilities to process patterns of optic flow related to self-motion. [source]

Mothers' facial expressions of pain and fear and infants' pain response during immunization,

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH JOURNAL, Issue 4 2010
Rachel E. Horton
The goal of the current study was to examine the relationship between mothers' spontaneous facial expressions of pain and fear immediately preceding their infants' immunizations and infants' facial expressions of pain immediately following immunizations. Infants' observations of mothers' faces prior to immunization also were examined to explore whether these observations moderated the effect of mothers' facial expressions on infant pain. The final sample included 58 mothers and their infants. Video data were used to code maternal facial expressions, infants' observations, and infants' expressions of pain. Infants who observed their mothers' faces had mothers who expressed significantly more fear pre-needle. Furthermore, mothers' facial expressions of mild fear pre-needle were associated with lower levels of infants' pain expression post-needle. A regression analysis confirmed maternal facial expressions of mild fear pre-needle as the strongest predictor of infant pain post-needle after controlling for infants' observations of mothers' faces. Mothers' subtle facial expressions of fear may indicate a relationship history of empathic caregiving that functions to support infants' abilities to regulate distress following painful procedures. Interventions aimed at improving caregiver sensitivity to infants' emotional cues may prove beneficial to infants in pain. Future directions in research are discussed. El objetivo del presente estudio fue examinar la relación entre lasespontáneas expresiones faciales de dolor y de miedo de las madres en elmomento inmediatamente anterior a la vacunación de sus infantes, y lasexpresiones faciales de dolor de los infantes inmediatamente después dela vacunación. También se examinaron las observaciones que losinfantes hacían de las caras de las madres antes de la vacunación,con el fin de explorar si estas observaciones servían para moderar elefecto de las expresiones faciales de las madres sobre el dolor de losinfantes. El grupo muestra final incluyó 58 madres y sus infantes. Lainformación en vídeo se usó para codificar las expresionesfaciales maternales, las observaciones de los infantes, y las expresiones dedolor de los infantes. Los infantes que observaron las caras de sus madrestenían madres que expresaban significativamente más miedo antes dela aguja. Es más, las expresiones faciales de las madres de poco miedoantes de la aguja se asociaron con bajos niveles de expresiones de dolor delos infantes después de la aguja. Un análisis de Regresiónconfirmó las expresiones faciales maternales de poco miedo antes de laaguja como el factor de predicción más fuerte del dolor del infantedespués de la aguja, después del experimento de control de lasobservaciones que el infante hacía de las caras de las madres. Lasexpresiones faciales de miedo de las madres más difíciles dedetectar o analizar pudieran indicar una historia de relación con unaprestación de cuidado de más empatía, la cual funciona paraapoyar las habilidades del infante de regular la ansiedad mental despuésde procedimientos dolorosos. Las intervenciones dirigidas a mejorar lasensibilidad de quienes prestan cuidado hacia las señas emocionales delos infantes pudieran demostrar que son beneficiosas para los infantes quesienten dolor. Se discuten las futuras direcciones de la investigación. Le but de cette étude était d'examiner la relation entre lesexpressions maternelles faciales spontanées de douleur et de peurprécédant immédiatement la vaccination de leurs nourrissons etles expressions faciales des nourrissons juste après les vaccinations.Les observations faites par les nourrissons des visages de leur mèreavant la vaccination ont aussi été examinées de fa,on àexplorer si ces observations modéraient l'effet des expressions facialesdes mères sur la douleur du nourrisson. L'échantillon final a inclucinquante-trois mères et leurs bébés. Des données vidéoont été utilisées pour coder les expressions facialesmaternelles, les observations des nourrissons et les expressions de douleurdes bébés. Les bébés qui observaient le visage de leursmères avaient des mères qui exprimaient bien plus de peur "avant laseringue". De plus, les expressions faciales des mères de peurmodérée étaient liées avec des niveaux plus bas d'expressionde douleur "après seringue". Une analyse de Régression aconfirmé les expressions faciales maternelles de peur modérée"avant la seringue" comme étant le facteur de prédiction le plusfort de la douleur du bébé "après la seringue" après avoircontrollé les observations des bébés du visage de leur mere. Lesexpressions faciales subtiles de peur des mères pourraient indiquer unehistoire de relation de mode de soin empathique qui fonctionne afin desoutenir les capacités des bébés à réguler ladétresse après des procédures médicales douloureuses. Lesinterventions qui ont eu pour but d'améliorer la sensibilité du modede soin aux signes émotionnels pourraient s'avérerbénéfiques aux bébés dans la douleur. Des directions futuresde recherches sont discutées. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Studie war es, die Beziehung zwischen denmütterlichen spontanen Gesichtsausdrücke von Schmerz und Angstunmittelbar vor der Impfung ihrer Kinder und der Mimik des Schmerzes derKleinkinder unmittelbar nach Impfungen zu untersuchen. Die kindlicheBeobachtung des Gesichtsausdrucks der Mutter vor der Immunisierung wurdeebenfalls geprüft, um zu erforschen, ob die kindliche Beobachtung dieWirkung der mütterlichen Mimik bei Schmerzen ihres Kindes beeinflusst.Die endgültige Stichprobe umfasste achtundfünfzig Müttern undihre Säuglinge. Video-Daten wurden verwendet, um die mütterlicheMimik, die kindliche Beobachtung der Mutter und Äußerungen desSchmerzes der Säuglinge zu codieren. Kleinkinder die denGesichtsausdruck der Mutter beobachteten, hatten Mütter die signifikantmehr Angst vor der Nadel zum Ausdruck brachten. Darüber hinausführte eine mütterliche Mimik, die wenig Angst vor der Nadel zeigte,zu einem niedrigeren Niveau von Ausdruck von Schmerzen der nach der Impfungim Gesicht der Säuglinge. Eine Regressionsanalyse bestätigt einemütterliche Mimik der milden Angst vor der Nadel, als der stärkstePrädiktor für kindliche Schmerzen nach der Nadel, sofern dieSäuglinge den Gesichtsausdruck der Mutter beobachtet hatten. Einesubtile Mimik der Angst der Mütter deutet auf eine emphatischeMutter-Kind Beziehung hin, die darauf abzielt, die kindliche Fähigkeitder Disstressregualtion nach schmerzhaften Eingriffen zu unterstützen.Maßnahmen zur Verbesserung der Sensibilität der Bezugspersonen mitihren Säuglingen bezüglich der emotionalen Reize, könnten sichals nützlich erweisen, um Kindern in Schmerzsituationen zuunterstützen. Zukünftige Richtungen in der Forschung werdendiskutiert. [source]

Correlated attributes and categorization in the first half-year of life

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOBIOLOGY, Issue 2 2004
Ramesh S. Bhatt
Abstract In two experiments with 36 human infants, we asked whether 3- and 6-month-olds could use correlations between attributes of individual objects to categorize. Infants learned to kick to move block mobiles that simultaneously displayed two categories defined by the figures displayed on them: the colors of the figures and the colors of the blocks. Two features were correlated, and the third varied across categories. Only 6-month-olds categorized novel category exemplars that preserved the original feature correlations (Experiment 1A), but both 3- and 6-month-olds discriminated feature recombinations that broke the original correlations (Experiment 1B). When category exemplars were presented successively, 6-month-olds also learned the feature correlations and used them to categorize (Experiment 2), but their performance was less robust. Infants' superior learning when stimuli were presented simultaneously may reflect "unitization," a learning disposition unique to immature infants. These experiments reveal that infants' ability to use correlated attributes to categorize emerges months earlier than previously thought. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 44: 103,115, 2004. [source]

Number sense in human infants

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2005
Fei Xu
Four experiments used a preferential looking method to investigate 6-month-old infants' capacity to represent numerosity in visual-spatial displays. Building on previous findings that such infants discriminate between arrays of eight versus 16 discs, but not eight versus 12 discs (Xu & Spelke, 2000), Experiments 1 and 2 investigated whether infants' numerosity discrimination depends on the ratio of the two set sizes with even larger numerosities. Infants successfully discriminated between arrays of 16 versus 32 discs, but not 16 versus 24 discs, providing evidence that their discrimination shows the set-size ratio signature of numerosity discrimination in human adults, children and many non-human animals. Experiments 3 and 4 addressed a controversy concerning infants' ability to discriminate large numerosities (observed under conditions that control for total filled area, array size and density, item size and correlated properties such as brightness: Brannon, 2002; Xu, 2003b; Xu & Spelke, 2000) versus small numerosities (not observed under conditions that control for total contour length: Clearfield & Mix, 1999). To investigate the sources of these differing findings, Experiment 3 tested infants' large-number discrimination with controls for contour length, and Experiment 4 tested small-number discrimination with controls for total filled area. Infants successfully discriminated the large-number displays but showed no evidence of discriminating the small-number displays. These findings provide evidence that infants have robust abilities to represent large numerosities. In contrast, infants may fail to represent small numerosities in visual-spatial arrays with continuous quantity controls, consistent with the thesis that separate systems serve to represent large versus small numerosities. [source]

German-learning infants' ability to detect unstressed closed-class elements in continuous speech

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2003
Barbara Höhle
The paper reports on two experiments with the head turn preference method which provide evidence that already at 7 to 9 months, but not yet at 6 months, German-learning infants do recognize unstressed closed-class lexical elements in continuous speech. These findings support the view that even preverbal children are able to compute at least phonological representations for closed-class functional elements. They also suggest that these elements must be available to the language learning mechanisms of the child from very early on, allowing the child to make use of the distributional properties of closed-class lexical elements for further top-down analysis of the linguistic input, e.g. segmentation and syntactic categorization. [source]

Object individuation and event mapping: developmental changes in infants' use of featural information

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2002
Teresa Wilcox
The present research examined the development of 4.5- to 7.5-month-old infants' ability to map different-features occlusion events using a simplified event-mapping task. In this task, infants saw a different-features (i.e. egg-column) event followed by a display containing either one object or two objects. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed infants' ability to judge whether the egg-column event was consistent with a subsequent one-column display. Experiments 3 and 4 examined infants' ability to judge whether the objects seen in the egg-column event and those seen in a subsequent display were consistent in their featural composition. At 7.5 and 5.5 months, but not at 4.5 months, the infants successfully mapped the egg-column event onto the one-column display. However, the 7.5- and 5.5-month-olds differed in whether they mapped the featural properties of those objects. Whereas the 7.5-month-olds responded as if they expected to see two specific objects, an egg and a column, in the final display the 5.5-month-olds responded as if they simply expected to see ,two objects'. Additional results revealed, however, that when spatiotemporal information specified the presence of two objects, 5.5-month-olds succeeded at tagging the objects as being featurally distinct, although they still failed to attach more specific information about what those differences were. Reasons for why the younger infants had difficulty integrating featural information into their object representations were discussed. [source]

Means-End Behavior in Young Infants: The Interplay of Action Perception and Action Production

INFANCY, Issue 6 2009
Moritz M. Daum
In 2 experiments, the interplay of action perception and action production was investigated in 6-month-old infants. In Experiment 1, infants received 2 versions of a means-end task in counterbalanced order. In the action perception version, a preferential looking paradigm in which infants were shown an actor performing means-end behavior with an expected and an unexpected outcome was used. In the action production version, infants had to pull a cloth to receive a toy. In Experiment 2, infants' ability to perform the action production task with a cloth was compared to their ability to perform the action production task with a less flexible board. Finally, Experiment 3 was designed to control for alternative low-level explanations of the differences in the looking times toward the final states presented in Experiment 1 by only presenting the final states of the action perception task without showing the initial action sequence. Results obtained in Experiment 1 showed that in the action perception task, infants discriminated between the expected and the unexpected outcome. This perceptual ability was independent of their actual competence in executing means- end behavior in the action production task. Experiment 2 showed no difference in 6-month-olds' performance in the action production task depending on the properties of the support under the toy. Similarly, in Experiment 3, no differences in looking times between the 2 final states were found. The findings are discussed in light of theories on the development of action perception and action production. [source]

Can Infants Use a Nonhuman Agent's Gaze Direction to Establish Word,Object Relations?

INFANCY, Issue 4 2009
Laura O'Connell
Adopting a procedure developed with human speakers, we examined infants' ability to follow a nonhuman agent's gaze direction and subsequently to use its gaze to learn new words. When a programmable robot acted as the speaker (Experiment 1), infants followed its gaze toward the word referent whether or not it coincided with their own focus of attention, but failed to learn a new word. When the speaker was human, infants correctly mapped the words (Experiment 2). Furthermore, when the robot interacted contingently, this did not facilitate infants' word mapping (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that gaze following upon hearing a novel word is not sufficient to learn the referent of the word when the speaker is nonhuman. [source]

The Effect of Learning Experiences and Context on Infant Imitation and Generalization

INFANCY, Issue 6 2008
Emily J. H. Jones
Over the first years of life, infants gradually develop the ability to retrieve their memories across cue and contextual changes. Whereas maturational factors drive some of these developments in memory ability, experiences occurring within the learning event may also impact infants' ability to retrieve memories in new situations. In 2 experiments we examined whether it was possible to facilitate 12-month-old infants' generalization of learning in the deferred imitation paradigm by varying experiences before or during the demonstration session, or during the retention interval. In Experiment 1, altering the length, timing, or variability of training had no impact on generalization; infants showed a low, but consistent level of memory retrieval. In Experiment 2, infants who experienced a unique context for encoding and retrieval exhibited generalization; infants who experienced the context prior to the demonstration session, or during the retention interval, did not. Specificity is a robust feature of infant memory and is not substantially altered by encoding experiences in an observational learning paradigm. Previous history with a learning environment can, however, impact the flexibility of memory retrieval. [source]

Changes in the Ability to Detect Ordinal Numerical Relationships Between 9 and 11 Months of Age

INFANCY, Issue 4 2008
Sumarga H. Suanda
When are the precursors of ordinal numerical knowledge first evident in infancy? Brannon (2002) argued that by 11 months of age, infants possess the ability to appreciate the greater than and less than relations between numerical values but that this ability experiences a sudden onset between 9 and 11 months of age. Here we present 5 experiments that explore the changes that take place between 9 and 11 months of age in infants' ability to detect reversals in the ordinal direction of a sequence of arrays. In Experiment 1, we replicate the finding that 11- but not 9-month-old infants detect a numerical ordinal reversal. In Experiment 2 we rule out an alternative hypothesis that 11-month-old infants attended to changes in the absolute numerosity of the first stimulus in the sequence rather than a reversal in ordinal direction. In Experiment 3, we demonstrate that 9-month-old infants are not aided by additional exposure to each numerosity stimulus in a sequence. In Experiment 4 we find that 11-month-old but not 9-month-old infants succeed at detecting the reversal in a nonnumerical size or area-based rule, casting doubt on Brannon's prior claim that what develops between 9 and 11 months of age is a specifically numerical ability. In Experiment 5 we demonstrate that 9-month-old infants are capable of detecting a reversal in ordinal direction but only when there are multiple converging cues to ordinality. Collectively these data indicate that at 11 months of age infants can represent ordinal relations that are based on number, size, or cumulative area, whereas at 9 months of age infants are unable to use any of these dimensions in isolation but instead require a confluence of cues. [source]

Type of Maternal Object Motion During Synchronous Naming Predicts Preverbal Infants' Learning of Word,Object Relations

INFANCY, Issue 2 2008
Dalit J. Matatyaho
Mothers' use of specific types of object motion in synchrony with object naming was examined, along with infants' joint attention to the mother and object, as a predictor of word learning. During a semistructured 3-min play episode, mothers (N = 24) taught the names of 2 toy objects to their preverbal 6- to 8-month-old infants. The episodes were recoded from Gogate, Bolzani, and Betancourt (2006) to provide a more fine-grained description of object motions used by mothers during naming. The results indicated that mothers used forward/downward and shaking motions more frequently and upward and backward motions less frequently in temporal synchrony with the spoken words. These motions likely highlight novel word,object relations. Furthermore, maternal use of shaking motions in synchrony with the spoken words and infants' ability to switch gaze from mother to object contributed to infants' learning of the word,object relations, as observed on a posttest. Thus, preverbal infants' learn word,object relations within an embodied system involving tightly coupled interaction between infants' perception and joint attention, and specific properties of caregivers' naming. [source]

Development of the infant's ability to retrieve food through a slit

Six-Month-Old Infants' Categorization of Containment Spatial Relations

CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2003
Marianella Casasola
Six-month-old infants' ability to form an abstract category of containment was examined using a standard infant categorization task. Infants were habituated to 4 pairs of objects in a containment relation. Following habituation, infants were tested with a novel example of the familiar containment relation and an example of an unfamiliar relation. Results indicate that infants look reliably longer at the unfamiliar versus familiar relation, indicating that they can form a categorical representation of containment. A second experiment demonstrated that infants do not rely on object occlusion to discriminate containment from a support or a behind spatial relation. Together, the results indicate that by 6 months, infants can recognize a containment relation from different angles and across different pairs of objects. [source]