Humans pay special attention to faces and speech from birth, but the interplay of developmental processes leading to specialization is poorly understood. We investigated the effects of face orientation on audiovisual (AV) speech perception in two age groups of infants (younger: 5- to 6.5-month-olds; older: 9- to 10.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFrom birth, we perceive speech by hearing and seeing people talk. In adults cortical representations of visual speech are processed in the putative temporal visual speech area (TVSA), but it remains unknown how these representations develop. We measured infants' cortical responses to silent visual syllables and non-communicative mouth movements using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn adults, the integration of audiovisual speech elicits specific higher (super-additive) or lower (sub-additive) cortical responses when compared to the responses to unisensory stimuli. Although there is evidence that the fronto-temporal network is active during perception of audiovisual speech in infancy, the development of fronto-temporal responses to audiovisual integration remains unknown. In the current study, 5-month-olds and 10-month-olds watched bimodal (audiovisual) and alternating unimodal (auditory + visual) syllables.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEarly in life, infants exhibit motor overflow, which can be defined as the generation of involuntary movements accompanying purposeful actions. We present the results of a quantitative study exploring motor overflow in 4-month-old infants. This is the first study quantifying motor overflow with high accuracy and precision provided by Inertial Motion Units.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: A child's motor development progresses very dynamically. It is crucial to develop freely available parent-report measures of motor development that can be easily used globally to measure motor skills and identify children in need of interventions. This paper presents the adaptation and validation of the Early Motor Questionnaire, which consists of gross motor (GM), fine motor (FM), and perception-action integration (PA) subscales, to the Polish language (EMQ-PL).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFrom early on, infants produce a variety of rhythmic behaviors-an ability that likely supports later social communication. However, it is unclear, how this rhythmic motor production changes with age. Here, we investigated the coupling between infants' arm movements across the first year of life in a social context of a rattle-shaking play with their mothers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe role of parental behaviour in modulating infant learning during experimental studies has been rarely explored. Yet, multiple strands of research suggest that dyadic infant-parent interactions could be as important for infant learning and regulation during experimental studies with infants, as they are during their free, unconstrained play. Recently, we have developed a coding scheme for analysing the quantity and quality of various extraneous behaviours of both the parent and the infant during standard eye-tracking experiments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfants' attention to the mouth is thought to support language acquisition, yet this relation has been scantly tested longitudinally. This study assessed attention to the mouth and the eyes at 5.5 (n = 91; Polish, 49% females) and 11 months, between time-point changes and their associations with language development in infancy (11 months) and toddlerhood (24 months).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfants' limb movements evolve from disorganized to more selectively coordinated during the first year of life as they learn to navigate and interact with an ever-changing environment more efficiently. However, how these coordination patterns change during the first year of life and across different contexts is unknown. Here, we used wearable motion trackers to study the developmental changes in the complexity of limb movements (arms and legs) at 4, 6, 9 and 12 months of age in two different tasks: rhythmic rattle-shaking and free play.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the 1st year of life, infants gradually gain the ability to control their eye movements and explore visual scenes, which support their learning and emerging cognitive skills. These gains include domain-general skills such as rapid orienting or attention disengagement as well as domain-specific ones such as increased sensitivity to social stimuli. However, it remains unknown whether these developmental changes in what infants fixate and for how long in naturalistic scenes lead to the emergence of more complex, repeated sequences of fixations, especially when viewing human figures and faces, and whether these changes are related to improvements in domain-general attentional skills.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEye-tracking measurement of looking is the fundamental method in infancy research. Over the last few decades it has provided many of the most significant discoveries in developmental psychology. Infants engage in looking tasks and use their bodies for learning differently from adults, yet, the breadth of their behavioural repertoire and the constraints that the testing situation places on them remain under-explored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMultiple visual attention mechanisms are active already in infancy, most notably one supporting orienting towards stimuli and another, maintaining appropriate levels of alertness, when exploring the environment. They are thought to depend on separate brain networks, but their effects are difficult to isolate in existing behavioural paradigms. Better understanding of the contribution of each network to individual differences in visual orienting may help to explain their role in attention development.
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