The role of local meaning in infants' fixations of natural scenes.

As infants view visual scenes every day, they must shift their eye gaze and visual attention from location to location, sampling information to process and learn. Like adults, infants' gaze when viewing natural scenes (i.e.

The cascading development of visual attention in infancy: Learning to look and looking to learn.

The development of visual attention in infancy is typically indexed by where and how long infants look, focusing on changes in alerting, orienting, or attentional control. However, visual attention and looking are both complex systems that are multiply determined. Moreover, infants' visual attention, looking, and learning are intimately connected.

Examining infants' visual paired comparison performance in the US and rural Malawi.

Measures of attention and memory were evaluated in 6- to 9-month-old infants from two diverse contexts. One sample consisted of African infants residing in rural Malawi (N = 228, 118 girls, 110 boys). The other sample consisted of racially diverse infants residing in suburban California (N = 48, 24 girls, 24 boys).

A Novel Approach to Assessing Infant and Child Mental Rotation.

Mental rotation is a critically important, early developing spatial skill that is related to other spatial cognitive abilities. Understanding the early development of this skill, however, requires a developmentally appropriate assessment that can be used with infants, toddlers, and young children. We present here a new eye-tracking task that uses a staircase procedure to assess mental rotation in 12-, 24-, and 36-month-old children (N = 41).

Diversity and representation in infant research: Barriers and bridges toward a globalized science of infant development.

Psychological researchers have become increasingly concerned with generalized accounts of human behavior based on narrow participant representation. This concern is particularly germane to infant research as findings from infant studies are often invoked to theorize broadly about the origins of human behavior. In this article, we examined participant diversity and representation in research published on infant development in four journals over the past decade.

The development of visual attention in infancy: A cascade approach.

Visual attention develops rapidly and significantly during the first postnatal years. At birth, infants have poor visual acuity, poor head and neck control, and as a result have little autonomy over where and how long they look. Across the first year, the neural systems that support alerting, orienting, and endogenous attention develop, allowing infants to more effectively focus their attention on information in the environment important for processing.

An investigation of mental rotation in infancy using change detection.

Two experiments were conducted to examine mental rotation in 6- to 12-month-old infants (N = 166) using a change detection task. These experiments were replications of Lauer and Lourenco (Lauer et al., 2015; Lauer & Lourenco, 2016), using identical stimuli and variations of their procedure, including an exact replication conducted in a laboratory setting (Experiment 1), and an online assessment using Lookit (Scott et al.

Understanding developmental cascades and experience: Diversity matters.

This Presidential Address is aimed at considering how infant development can be understood in terms of developmental cascades. Adopting a developmental cascades approach may be especially useful for understanding development in infancy, when changes occur in multiple domains over relatively short time spans. Thinking about change in terms of developmental cascades highlights the role of the input in development, both in terms of how the input changes with development and in terms of how differences in the input lead to different developmental pathways.

Expanded carrier screening for reproductive risk assessment: An evidence-based practice guideline from the National Society of Genetic Counselors.

Expanded carrier screening (ECS) intends to broadly screen healthy individuals to determine their reproductive chance for autosomal recessive (AR) and X-linked (XL) conditions with infantile or early-childhood onset, which may impact reproductive management (Committee Opinion 690, Obstetrics and Gynecology, 2017, 129, e35). Compared to ethnicity-based screening, which requires accurate knowledge of ancestry for optimal test selection and appropriate risk assessment, ECS panels consist of tens to hundreds of AR and XL conditions that may be individually rare in various ancestries but offer a comprehensive approach to inherited disease screening. As such, the term "equitable carrier screening" may be preferable.

The association between plasma choline, growth and neurodevelopment among Malawian children aged 6-15 months enroled in an egg intervention trial.

Choline is an essential micronutrient that may influence growth and development; however, few studies have examined postnatal choline status and children's growth and development in low- and middle-income countries. The aim of this observational analysis was to examine associations of plasma choline with growth and development among Malawian children aged 6-15 months enrolled in an egg intervention trial. Plasma choline and related metabolites (betaine, dimethylglycine and trimethylamine N-oxide) were measured at baseline and 6-month follow-up, along with anthropometric (length, weight, head circumference) and developmental assessments (the Malawi Developmental Assessment Tool [MDAT], the Infant Orienting with Attention task [IOWA], a visual paired comparison [VPC] task and an elicited imitation [EI] task).

The impact of face masks on infants' learning of faces: An eye tracking study.

This preregistered study examined how face masks influenced face memory in a North American sample of 6- to 9-month-old infants (N = 58) born during the COVID-19 pandemic. Infants' memory was tested using a standard visual paired comparison (VPC) task. We crossed whether or not the faces were masked during familiarization and test, yielding four trial types (masked-familiarization/masked-test, unmasked-familiarization/masked-test, masked-familiarization/unmasked-test, and unmasked-familiarization/unmasked-test).

A new perspective on the role of physical salience in visual search: Graded effect of salience on infants' attention.

We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and non-White infants ( = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a ) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and "pops out" in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead varies in a graded manner on the basis of quantitative differences in physical salience. Infants viewed arrays of four or six items; one item was a singleton and the other items were identical distractors (e.g.

Natural Variability in Parent-Child Puzzle Play at Home.

Here, we observed 3- to 4-year-old children (=31) and their parents playing with puzzles at home during a zoom session to provide insight into the variability of the kinds of puzzles children have in their home, and the variability in how children and their parents play with spatial toys. We observed a large amount of variability in both children and parents' behaviors, and in the puzzles they selected. Further, we found relations between parents' and children's behaviors.

"May I Grab Your Attention?": An Investigation Into Infants' Visual Preferences for Handled Objects Using Lookit as an Online Platform for Data Collection.

We examined the relation between 4- to 12-month-old infants' ( = 107) motor development and visual preference for handled or non-handled objects, using Lookit (lookit.mit.edu) as an online tool for data collection.

Developmental changes in natural scene viewing in infancy.

We extend decades of research on infants' visual processing by examining their eye gaze during viewing of natural scenes. We examined the eye movements of a racially diverse group of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 54; 27 boys; 24 infants were White and not Hispanic, 30 infants were African American, Asian American, mixed race and/or Hispanic) as they viewed images selected from the MIT Saliency Benchmark Project. In general, across this age range infants' fixation distributions became more consistent and more adult-like, suggesting that infants' fixations in natural scenes become increasingly more systematic.

Linking patterns of infant eye movements to a neural network model of the ventral stream using representational similarity analysis.

Little is known about the development of higher-level areas of visual cortex during infancy, and even less is known about how the development of visually guided behavior is related to the different levels of the cortical processing hierarchy. As a first step toward filling these gaps, we used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to assess links between gaze patterns and a neural network model that captures key properties of the ventral visual processing stream. We recorded the eye movements of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 54) as they viewed photographs of scenes.

Evaluating parental genetic knowledge of hearing loss with and without pre-test genetic counseling in a pediatric otolaryngology clinic.

This study evaluated parental knowledge of genetics of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) and satisfaction following pre-test consult with and without genetic counseling (GC). A survey evaluating parents' knowledge of genetics for SNHL with and without GC was administered to parents of children with SNHL who were offered genetic testing. The survey also inquired about satisfaction, and decision to pursue genetic testing.

Infant Eye Gaze While Viewing Dynamic Faces.

Research using eye tracking methods has revealed that when viewing faces, between 6 to 10 months of age, infants begin to shift visual attention from the eye region to the mouth region. Moreover, this shift varies with stimulus characteristics and infants' experience with faces and languages. The current study examined the eye movements of a racially diverse sample of 98 infants between 7.

Visual short-term memory for overtly attended objects during infancy.

We investigated limitations in young infants' visual short-term memory (VSTM). We used a one-shot change detection task to ask whether 4- and 8.5-month-old infants (N = 59) automatically encode fixated items in VSTM.

Robust data and power in infant research: A case study of the effect of number of infants and number of trials in visual preference procedures.

As in many areas of science, infant research suffers from low power. The problem is further compounded in infant research because of the difficulty in recruiting and testing large numbers of infant participants. Researchers have been searching for a solution and, as illustrated by this special section, have been focused on getting the most out of infant data.

Early Child Development Outcomes of a Randomized Trial Providing 1 Egg Per Day to Children Age 6 to 15 Months in Malawi.

Background: Eggs are a rich source of nutrients important for brain development, including choline, riboflavin, vitamins B-6 and B-12, folate, zinc, protein, and DHA.

Objective: Our objective was to evaluate the effect of the consumption of 1 egg per day over a 6-mo period on child development.

Methods: In the Mazira Project randomized controlled trial, 660 children aged 6-9 mo were randomly allocated into an intervention or control group.

Developing an Understanding of Emotion Categories: Lessons from Objects.

How and when infants and young children begin to develop emotion categories is not yet well understood. Research has largely treated the learning problem as one of identifying perceptual similarities among exemplars (typically posed, stereotyped facial configurations). However, recent meta-analyses and reviews converge to suggest that emotion categories are abstract, involving high-dimensional and situationally variable instances.

Habit2: A stand-alone software solution for presenting stimuli and recording infant looking times in order to study infant development.

Many aspects of infant development are assessed using infant looking times to visual and audiovisual stimuli. In this article, we describe a stand-alone software package that allows simultaneous stimulus presentation to infants and recording of their looking times via a keypress by a human observer. The software was developed to run both on 64-bit Intel-based Macs running Mac OS/X 10.