Examining the role of social cues in early word learning.

Infants watched a video of an adult pointing towards two different objects while hearing novel labels. Analyses indicated that 14- and 18-month-olds looked longer at the target object, but only 18-month-olds showed word learning. The results suggest that different types of social cues are available at different ages.

Early information processing among infants with and without spina bifida.

This study focuses on the development of early visual information processing among infants with spina bifida (SB) compared to typically developing infants using the habituation-dishabituation paradigm. Analyses were conducted in two stages. First infants were evaluated to determine if 18-month old infants (SB=47; Control=40) differed in their ability to shift attention and habituate to two female faces, as well as their responses to composite and novel stimuli.

Labels can override perceptual categories in early infancy.

An extensive body of research claims that labels facilitate categorisation, highlight the commonalities between objects and act as invitations to form categories for young infants before their first birthday. While this may indeed be a reasonable claim, we argue that it is not justified by the experiments described in the research. We report on a series of experiments that demonstrate that labels can play a causal role in category formation during infancy.

Modeling Age Differences in Infant Category Learning.

We used an encoder version of cascade correlation to simulate Younger and Cohen's (1983, 1986) finding that 10-month-olds recover attention on the basis of correlations among stimulus features, but 4- and 7-month-olds recover attention on the basis of stimulus features. We captured these effects by varying the score threshold parameter in cascade correlation, which controls how deeply training patterns are learned. When networks learned deeply, they showed more error to uncorrelated than to correlated test patterns, indicating that they abstracted correlations during familiarization.

Modeling the Development of Infant Categorization.

Research on infant categorization has made remarkable progress since the first studies were reported in the late 1970s (e.g., Cohen & Caputo, 1978; Cohen & Strauss, 1977; Strauss, 1979).

Six-month-old infants' categorization of containment spatial relations.

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.

Eight-Month-Old Infants' Perception of Possible and Impossible Events.

This study investigated 8-month-old infants' perception of object permanence in an extension of the rotating screen studies by Baillargeon (1987) and Baillargeon, Spelke, and Wasserman (1985). Using computer-animated stimuli similar to the "live" stimuli used by Baillargeon and her colleagues (Baillargeon, 1987; Baillargeon et al., 1985), 48 8-month-old infants were habituated to 1 of 4 computer-animated events and then tested on all 4 events.