Infants' conceptual representations of meaningful verbal and nonverbal sounds.

In adults, words are more effective than sounds at activating conceptual representations. We aimed to replicate these findings and extend them to infants. In a series of experiments using an eye tracker object recognition task, suitable for both adults and infants, participants heard either a word (e.

Speech Intonation Induces Enhanced Face Perception in Infants.

Infants' preference for faces with direct compared to averted eye gaze, and for infant-directed over adult-directed speech, reflects early sensitivity to social communication. Here, we studied whether infant-directed speech (IDS), could affect the processing of a face with direct gaze in 4-month-olds. In a new ERP paradigm, the word 'hello' was uttered either in IDS or adult-direct speech (ADS) followed by an upright or inverted face.

Neural signatures of recognition memory in 10- to 12-month-old infants.

Understanding memory mechanisms is crucial in the study of infant social and cognitive development. Here, we show that the Nc ERP component, known to reflect frequency-related attentional and/or memory processes, is a good candidate to investigate infant recognition memory. Previous paradigms have only investigated the effect of frequency during on-line stimulus presentation, but not during stimulus encoding.

The interplay of holistic shape, local feature and color information in object categorization.

Although it is widely accepted that colors facilitate object and scene recognition under various circumstances, several studies found no effects of color removal in tasks requiring categorization of briefly presented animals in natural scenes. In this study, three experiments were performed to test the assumption that the discrepancy between empirical data is related to variations of the available meaningful global information such as object shapes and contextual cues. Sixty-one individuals categorized chromatic and achromatic versions of intact and scrambled images containing either cars or birds.