Publications by authors named "Alyson Hock"

Accurate assessment of emotion requires the coordination of information from different sources such as faces, bodies, and voices. Adults readily integrate facial and bodily emotions. However, not much is known about the developmental origin of this capacity.

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This study addressed the development of attention to information that is socially relevant to adults by examining infants' (N=64) scanning patterns of male and female bodies. Infants exhibited systematic attention to regions associated with sex-related scanning by adults, with 3.5- and 6.

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Configural information (spacing between features) contributes to face-processing expertise in adulthood. We examined whether infants can be "trained" to process this information. In Experiment 1, 3.

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Adults exhibit enhanced attention to negative emotions like fear, which is thought to be an adaptive reaction to emotional information. Previous research, mostly conducted with static faces, suggests that infants exhibit an attentional bias toward fearful faces only at around 7months of age. In a recent study (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2016, Vol.

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Appropriate processing of emotions is paramount for successful social functioning. Adults' enhanced attention to negative emotions such as fear is thought to be a critical aspect of this adaptive functioning. Prior studies indicate that increased attention to fear relative to positive or neutral emotions begins at around 7months of age, and it has been suggested that this negativity bias is related to self-locomotion.

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Although we know much about the development of face processing, we know considerably less about the development of body knowledge-despite bodies also being significant sources of social information. One set of studies indicated that body structure knowledge is poor during the 1st year of life and spawned a model that posits that, unlike the development of face knowledge, which benefits from innate propensities and dedicated learning mechanisms, the development of body knowledge relies on general learning mechanisms and develops slowly. In this article, we review studies on infants' knowledge about the structure of bodies and their processing of gender and emotion that paint a different picture.

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Reading achievement scores for adolescents with disabilities are markedly lower than the scores of adolescents without disabilities. For example, 62% of students with disabilities read below the basic level on the NAEP Reading assessment, compared to 19% of their nondisabled peers. This achievement gap has been a continuing challenge for more than 35 years.

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Holistic processing is tied to expertise and is characteristic of face and body perception by adults. Infants process faces holistically, but it is unknown whether they process body information holistically. In the present study, infants were tested for discrimination between body postures that differed in limb orientations in three conditions: in the context of the whole body, with just the isolated limbs that changed orientation, or with the limbs in the context of scrambled body parts.

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Sex is a significant social category, and adults derive information about it from both faces and bodies. Research indicates that young infants process sex category information in faces. However, no prior study has examined whether infants derive sex categories from bodies and match faces and bodies in terms of sex.

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Even in the absence of facial information, adults are able to efficiently extract emotions from bodies and voices. Although prior research indicates that 6.5-month-old infants match emotional body movements to vocalizations, the developmental origins of this function are unknown.

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Adults' face processing expertise includes sensitivity to second-order configural information (spatial relations among features such as distance between eyes). Prior research indicates that infants process this information in female faces. In the current experiments, 9-month-olds discriminated spacing changes in upright human male and monkey faces but not in inverted faces.

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Adults recognize emotions conveyed by bodies with comparable accuracy to facial emotions. However, no prior study has explored infants' perception of body emotions. In Experiment 1, 6.

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