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Seven- to 12-month-olds were trained to press levers that contingently activated lights. Infants had the choice of turning on either a light an adult interaction partner was looking at or a light that she turned away from. By 9 months, infants reliably turned on the light that the adult was looking at. In a second study, 9- and 12-month-old infants could see the adult's upper body but not her face during the test. Nine-month-old infants showed the same pattern of results as in Study 1. However, turning on the light that the adult looked at dropped to chance level for 12-month-olds. Results suggest that feedback from movement cues might influence infants' behaviour at 9 and 12 months of age but that shared visual attention with others may drive infants' behaviour by 12 months. The new paradigm provides a new method to assess the development of social cognitive skills among infants.

A perturbation paradigm was employed to assess 3- and 6-month-old infants' and their mothers' sensitivity to a 3-s temporal delay implemented in an ongoing televised interaction. At both ages, the temporal delay affected infant but not maternal behavior and only when implementing the temporal delay in maternal (Experiment 1, N = 64) but not infant (Experiment 2, N = 60) behavior. In addition, the experimental manipulation influenced promptness of maternal smiling responses reliably more than promptness of infant smiling responses. The findings suggest that the timing of maternal behavior plays an important role in infants' perception of maternal responsiveness, whereas mothers seem to monitor general aspects of infant behavior such as overall level of engagement.

Recent research has demonstrated that infants' attention towards novel objects is affected by an adult's emotional expression and eye gaze toward the object. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated how infants at 3, 6, and 9 months of age process fearful compared to neutral faces looking toward objects or averting gaze away from objects. Furthermore, we examined how the processing of novel objects is affected by gaze direction and emotional expression. We hypothesized that an adult's fearful expression should be particularly salient when it is directed toward a referent in the environment. Furthermore, responses to objects should be increased if the face previously expressed fear toward the object. Three-month-olds did not show differential neural responses to fearful vs. neutral faces regardless of gaze direction. Six-month-olds showed an enhanced negative central (Nc) component for fearful relative to neutral faces looking toward objects, but not when eye gaze was averted away from the objects. Furthermore, 6-month-olds showed an enhanced Nc for objects that had been gaze-cued by a fearful compared to a neutral face. Nine-month-olds showed an enhanced Nc for fearful relative to neutral faces in both eye gaze conditions and showed an enhanced Nc for objects that had been gaze-cued by a neutral face. The findings are discussed in the context of social cognitive and brain development.

This study investigates the relationship between having an older sibling and early goal-directed motor development. In a longitudinal study, infants were filmed playing with their mother and were observed at 5 and 12 months of age. After each observation, they were assessed with the Mental Bayley Scale. From the mother-child interaction, playing was coded in terms of the production of infant goal-directed actions. Results indicated that infants with siblings produced fewer goal-directed actions at 5 months than infants without older siblings, but at 12 months they produced relatively more goal-directed actions than infants without older siblings. There was no relationship with scores on the Mental Bayley Scale. In order to examine differences in adult behavior that may account for variation in infant motor performance, maternal level of motionese was scored with no differences found between the sibling-no sibling groups. (Contains 1 figure.)

Combined with emotional expressions, eye gaze can provide essential information to indicate threat in the environment. The current study assessed the effects of eye gaze direction on infants' neural processing of fearful and angry faces. Event-related potentials were recorded from thirteen 7-month-old infants. Two face-sensitive posterior components, the N290 and P400, as well as a frontocentral negative component (Nc), indicating attentional arousal, were sensitive to eye gaze direction and emotion. A larger Nc was observed for angry faces with direct compared to averted eye gaze. Fearful faces elicited a larger N290 than angry faces, whereas angry faces elicited a more prominent P400 regardless of eye gaze direction. The findings are discussed in terms of early social cognitive and neural development.

We examined the effects of joint attention for object learning in 5- and 7-month-old infants. Infants interacted with an adult social partner who taught them about a novel toy in two conditions. In the "Joint Attention" condition, the adult spoke about the toy while alternating gaze between the infant and the toy, while in the "Object Only" condition, the adult looked to the toy and to a spot on the ceiling, but never at the infant. In the test trials following each social interaction, we presented infants with the "familiarization" toy and a novel toy, and monitored looking times to each object. We found that 7-month-olds looked significantly longer to the novel toy following the "Joint Attention" relative to the "Object Only" condition, while 5-month-old infants did not show a significant difference across conditions. We interpret these results to suggest that joint attention facilitated 7-month-old infants' encoding of information about the familiarization object. Implications for the ontogeny of infant learning in joint attention contexts are discussed. (Contains 4 figures.)

Event-related brain potentials were measured in 7- and 12-month-old infants to examine the development of processing happy and angry facial expressions. In 7-month-olds a larger negativity to happy faces was observed at frontal, central, temporal and parietal sites (Experiment 1), whereas 12-month-olds showed a larger negativity to angry faces at occipital sites (Experiment 2). These data suggest that processing of these facial expressions undergoes development between 7 and 12 months: while 7-month-olds exhibit heightened sensitivity to happy faces, 12-month-olds resemble adults in their heightened sensitivity to angry faces. In Experiment 3 infants' visual preference was assessed behaviorally, revealing that the differences in ERPs observed at 7 and 12 months do not simply reflect differences in visual preference.

In Study 1, 7-month-old infants (N = 58) looked reliably more at an adult's face when she playfully pulled a toy away from them compared with when she simply handed them the toy. In Study 2, 7- and 9-month-old infants (N = 36) interacted with an adult who played a teasing game and then held a neutral or happy facial expression. Compared with a baseline in which infants looked equally to both expressions, after the tease, infants looked longer at the neutral compared with the happy expression. By 7 months, infants may use facial expressions to disambiguate others' actions.

In two studies, the reason that infants in a novel situation look to adults was assessed. In Study 1, 10- and 13-month-old infants encountered a visual cliff that was deep (56 cm) or ambiguous (20 cm). Infants crossed the ambiguous cliff reliably faster than the deep cliff, and the first looks to mother of infants in the deep cliff condition were longer than those of infants in the ambiguous cliff condition. In Study 2, infants on an ambiguous cliff were tested either in a condition in which the mother was looking at the cliff (face plus voice) or away from the cliff (voice only) while encouraging the infants to cross. Infants' crossing times and looks to mother did not differ as a function of condition. In the two other conditions, infants' looks to mother and duration to cross were assessed when no cues were provided (no cues) or when the mother was providing information to an adult (talk to adult). Compared with the number of infants in the face plus voice and voice only conditions, the number of infants who became fussy in the no cues and talk to adult conditions was reliably greater. Those infants who crossed the cliff in the no cues and talk to adult conditions crossed as fast as infants in the other two conditions. The discussion focuses on the meaning of infants' first looks and on infants' understanding of cues that are intended for them versus for someone else.

The present work investigated the development of an explicit understanding of pretend play actions. Study 1 revealed a long decalage between earlier implicit understanding of pretence as an intentional activity and a later more explicit understanding. Study 2 was a training study. It tested for two factors--systematic pretence experience and explicit pretence discourse--that may be important in development from early implicit to later explicit pretence understanding. Two training groups of 3.5-year-old children received the same pretence experiences involving systematic contrasts between pretending, really performing and trying to perform actions. In the "explicit" group, these experiences were talked about with explicit "pretend to" and "pretend that" language. In the "implicit" group no such discourse was used, but only implicit discourse in talking about pretence versus real actions. The two training groups were compared with a control group that received functional play experience. After training, only the explicit group showed improvement in their explicit pretence understanding. In none of the groups was there any transfer to tasks tapping mental state understanding, false belief (FB) and appearance-reality, (A-R). The findings are discussed in the context of current theories about the developmental relations between pretence, discourse, and mental state understanding.

We examined 7-month-old infants' processing of emotionally congruent and incongruent face-voice pairs using ERP measures. Infants watched facial expressions (happy or angry) and, after a delay of 400 ms, heard a word spoken with a prosody that was either emotionally congruent or incongruent with the face being presented. The ERP data revealed that the amplitude of a negative component and a subsequent positive component in infants' ERPs varied as a function of crossmodal emotional congruity. An emotionally incongruent prosody elicited a larger negative component in infants' ERPs than did an emotionally congruent prosody. Conversely, the amplitude of infants' positive component was larger to emotionally congruent than to incongruent prosody. Previous work has shown that an attenuation of the negative component and an enhancement of the later positive component in infants' ERPs reflect the recognition of an item. Thus, the current findings suggest that 7-month-olds integrate emotional information across modalities and recognize common affect in the face and voice.

Classically, infants are thought to point for 2 main reasons: (a) They point imperatively when they want an adult to do something for them (e.g., give them something; "Juice!"), and (b) they point declaratively when they want an adult to share attention with them to some interesting event or object ("Look!"). Here we demonstrate the existence of another motive for infants' early pointing gestures: to inform another person of the location of an object that person is searching for. This informative motive for pointing suggests that from very early in ontogeny humans conceive of others as intentional agents with informational states and they have the motivation to provide such information communicatively. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.)

Infants' sensitivity to social contingencies was assessed. In Study 1, 1-month-old infants and their mothers interacted face-to-face in three types of imperfect contingent interactions: Normal, Non-Contingent and Imitation. One-month-old infants did not discriminate these conditions. In Study 2, 3-month-old infants were tested as in Study 1. At 3 months of age, infants gazed reliably longer in the Imitation condition and smiled reliably more in the Normal than in the Non-Contingent and Imitation interactions. These findings suggest a developmental transition in the sensitivity to social contingencies between 1 and 3 months of age. The relationship between the developing sensitivity to social contingencies and social cognition is discussed.

Joint attention skills are an important part of human cultural learning. However, little is known about the emergence and meaning of these skills in early ontogeny. The development of, and relation among, various joint attention skills was assessed. Seventy-two 5 to 10-month-old infants were tested on a variety of joint attention tasks. Intercorrelations among these tasks were sparse, which puts into question the meaning of these various skills. In addition, the majority of infants exhibited some joint attention skill before 9 months of age, which points to a more gradual development of joint attention skills than suggested by previous research.

In Study 1, 54 3-, 6- and 9-month-old infants interacted with an adult stranger who engaged in a face-to-face (dyadic) exchange. Dyadic interaction was halted when the adult turned away to look at an object. In a Joint Attention condition, the adult alternated visual attention between the infant and the object, and in a Look Away condition she looked away at the object only. Infants gazed and smiled more in the Joint Attention condition compared to in the Look Away condition. Infants' gazing to the target object interacted with age and condition. In Study 2, 37 3-, 6- and 9-month old infants interacted with an adult who coordinated visual attention and affect, affect only, visual attention only, or ignored the infant. Infants gazed reliably more at E when she coordinated both affect and attention and smiled reliably more when the adult coordinated affect and attention or attention only. The findings show a sensitivity to triadic attention by 3 months of age.

Three types of role reversal imitation were investigated in typically developing 12- and 18-month-old infants and in children with autism and other developmental delays. Many typically developing infants at both ages engaged in each of the 2 types of dyadic, body-oriented role reversal imitation: self-self reversals, in which the adult acted on herself and the child then acted on himself, and other-other reversals, in which the adult acted on the child and the child then acted back on the adult. However, 12-month-olds had more difficulty than 18-month-olds with triadic, object-mediated role reversals involving interactions around objects. There was little evidence of any type of role reversal imitation in children with autism. Positive relations were found between role reversal imitation and various measures of language development for 18-month-olds and children with autism. (Contains 5 tables and 4 figures.)

The focus of the present study was the role of cultural learning in infants' acquisition of pretense actions with objects. In three studies, 18- and 24-month-olds (n= 64) were presented with novel objects, and either pretense or instrumental actions were demonstrated with these. When children were then allowed to act upon the objects themselves, qualitatively similar patterns of cultural (imitative) learning both of pretend and of instrumental actions were observed, suggesting that both types of actions can be acquired in similar ways through processes of cultural learning involving one or another form of collective intentionality. However, both absolute imitation rates and creativity were lower in pretense compared to instrumental actions, suggesting that the collective intentionality that constitutes pretense is especially difficult for children to comprehend. An additional analysis of children's gazes to the experimenter during their actions revealed that 24-month-olds looked more often to the experimenter during pretense actions than during instrumental actions--suggesting that pretense is culturally learned in a similar fashion as practical actions, but that young children understand pretense as a more inherently social, intersubjective activity.

To examine the influences of facial versus vocal cues on infants' behavior in a potentially threatening situation, 12-month-olds on a visual cliff received positive facial-only, vocal-only, or both facial and vocal cues from mothers. Infants' crossing times and looks to mother were assessed. Infants crossed the cliff faster with multimodal and vocal than with facial cues, and looked more to mother in the Face Plus Voice compared to the Voice Only condition. The findings suggest that vocal cues, even without a visual reference, are more potent than facial cues in guiding infants' behavior. The discussion focuses on the meaning of infants' looks and the role of voice in development of social cognition.

In 3 studies, young children were tested for their understanding of pretend actions. In Studies 1 and 2, pairs of superficially similar behaviors were presented to 26- and 36-month-old children in an imitation game. In one case the behavior was marked as trying (signs of effort), and in the other case as pretending (signs of playfulness). Three-year-olds, and to some degree 2-year-olds, performed the real action themselves (or tried to really perform it) after the trying model, whereas after the pretense model, they only pretended. Study 3 ruled out a simple mimicking explanation by showing that children not only imitated differentially but responded differentially with appropriate productive pretending to pretense models and with appropriate productive tool use to trying models. The findings of the 3 studies demonstrate that by 2 to 3 years of age, children have a concept of pretense as a specific type of intentional activity.

Twenty-five newborn infants were tested for auditory-oral matching behavior when presented with the consonant sound /m/ and the vowel sound /a/--a precursor behavior to vocal imitation. Auditory-oral matching behavior by the infant was operationally defined as showing the mouth movement appropriate for producing the model sound just heard (mouth opening for /a/ and mouth clutching for /m/), even when the infant produced no sound herself. With this new dependent measure, the current study is the first to show matching behavior to consonant sounds in newborns: infants showed significantly more instances of mouth opening after /a/ models than after /m/ models, and more instances of mouth clutching after /m/ models than after /a/ models. The results are discussed in the context of theories of active intermodal mapping and innate releasing mechanisms.

In a first study, we considered whether modelling and the type of an adult's request influenced children's ability at 1;8 and 2;2 to comprehend gestures and replica objects as symbols for familiar objects. In a second study, we evaluated whether modelling and type of request influenced children's ability at 1;8 (N=24) to understand unfamiliar (i.e. unconventional) objects as symbols. Results of Study 1 indicated that children at 2;2 comprehended a gesture as a symbol in the absence of any previous model demonstration. All children comprehended a replica as standing for another object, although modelling marginally improved children's performance at 2;2 and decreased performance at 1;8. In general, the type of request did not influence children's comprehension of gestures or replicas as symbols. Results of Study 2 showed that modelling and request type did not influence children's understanding of objects that are unconventional and novel, as symbols. The studies converge to suggest that symbolic comprehension is a highly context-dependent ability that continues to develop over the second year.

Videotaped 2-, 4-, and 6-month olds during interaction with a female adult stranger engaging in organized or disorganized peekaboo games. Found that from a diffuse sensitivity to the presence of a social partner, infants by 4 months develop a new sensitivity to the narrative envelope of protoconversation, in particular the timing and structure of social exchanges scaffolded by adults. (Author/KB)

Maintains that Muller and Overton (1998) challenge the current Zeitgeist regarding infant cognitive development. Suggests that researchers reconsider infants as developing actors in a meaningful environment, not as born philosophers. Notes the need to explore processes underlying key transitions in infancy and the relation between action and cognition in early ontogeny. (Author/KB)

The sequential nature of action ensures that an individual can anticipate the conclusion of an observed action via the use of semantic rules. The semantic processing of language and action has been linked to the N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP). The authors developed an ERP paradigm in which infants and adults observed simple sequences of actions. In one condition the conclusion of the sequence was anticipated, whereas in the other condition the conclusion was not anticipated. Adults and infants at 9 months and 7 months were assessed via the same neural mechanisms--the N400 component and analysis of the theta frequency. Results indicated that adults and infants at 9 months produced N400-like responses when anticipating action conclusions. The infants at 7 mouths displayed no N400 component. Analysis of the theta frequency provided support for the relation between the N400 and semantic processing. This study suggests that infants at 9 months anticipate goals and use similar cognitive mechanisms to adults in this task. In addition, this result suggests that language processing may derive from understanding action in early development. Keywords: action perception, semantic processing, infants, N400, theta