The Representation of Geometric Cues in Infancy

There is evidence that, from an early age, humans are sensitive to spatial information such as simple landmarks and the size of objects. This study concerns the ability to represent a particular kind of spatial information, namely, the geometry of an enclosed layout—an ability present in older children, adults, and nonhuman animals (e.g., Cheng, 1986; Hermer & Spelke, 1996). Using a looking‐time procedure, 4.5‐ to 6.5‐month‐olds were tested on whether they could distinguish among the corners of an isosceles triangle. On each trial, the target corner was marked by a red dot. The stimulus (triangle with dot) appeared from different orientations across trials, ensuring that only cues related to the triangle itself could be used to differentiate the corners. When orientations were highly variable, infants discriminated the unique corner (i.e., the corner with the smaller angle and two equal‐length sides) from a nonunique corner; they could not discriminate between the two nonunique corners. With less variable orientations, however, infants did discriminate between the nonunique corners of the isosceles triangle. Implications for how infants represent geometric cues are discussed.     

Developmental Trajectories of Emotion Regulation Across Infancy: Do Age and the Social Partner Influence Temporal Patterns

The ability to effectively regulate emotions is a critical component of early socio‐emotional development. This longitudinal study examined the developmental trajectories of emotion regulation in a sample of 3‐, 5‐, and 7‐month‐olds during an interaction with mothers and fathers. Infants' negative affect and use of behavioral strategies, including distraction, self‐soothing, and high intensity motor behaviors were rated during the still‐face episode of the Still‐Face Paradigm. Longitudinal mixed‐effects models were tested to determine whether strategies were followed by an increase or decrease in negative affect. Results from mother‐infant and father‐infant dyads indicated that focusing attention away from the unresponsive parent and engaging in self‐soothing behaviors were associated with a subsequent decline in negative affect and the strength of these temporal associations were stable across infancy. In contrast, high‐intensity motor behaviors were followed by an increase in negative affect and this effect declined over time. No significant effects were found for the behavioral strategy of looking at the parent. Results underscore the importance of considering infant age and the social partner when studying the effectiveness of emotion regulatory strategies in early infancy.     

The Development of Anticipatory Postural Adjustments in Infancy

Efficient voluntary action requires postural adjustments that compensate for potential balance disturbances before they occur. These anticipatory postural adjustments have been widely investigated in adults, but relatively little is known about their development, especially during infancy. This study examined the early development of anticipatory postural activity in support of pulling action while standing. A total of 34 infants between 10 and 17 months were tested. The task required infants to open a cabinet drawer to retrieve toys while a force resisting the pulling action was applied to the drawer. The experiment included between 9 and 13 pulling trials. The force resisting the pull was doubled after the first 4 initial trials and returned again to its original value after another 4 trials. Electromyographic activity from the gastrocnemius and biceps brachii muscles was recorded. The proportion of pulls involving anticipatory activity in the gastrocnemius muscles progressively increased between 10 and 17 months. In addition, infants with considerable experience in opening drawers learned to recruit greater strength of their anticipatory postural adjustments for heavier pulls. Implications for the role of motoric experience in anticipatory postural activity are discussed.     

Heterogeneity of Joy in Infancy

We examined 7‐month‐old infants' responses to 6 joy‐eliciting episodes. Three episodes included and 3 did not include a major social‐interactive component. Confirmatory factor analysis of infants' joy reactions in these episodes revealed that a 2‐factor model significantly improved the fit over a single‐factor solution. Those 2 factors represented infants' social versus nonsocial joy reactions. Different correlates of those factors supported their external validity. Only social joy was associated with the infants' positive emotional tone observed during naturalistic interactions with their mothers and fathers, and with the parents' ratings of the child's positive affect during social interactions in their daily lives. Social joy may be an early antecedent of future positive emotionality traits related to communal and interpersonal aspects of experience.     

Mechanisms of Categorization in Infancy

This article presents a connectionist model of correlation‐based categorization by 10‐month‐old infants (Younger, 1985). Simple autoencoder networks were exposed to the same stimuli used to test 10‐month‐olds. The familiarization regime was kept as close as possible to that used with the infants. The performance of the model matched that of the infants. Both infants and networks used covariation information (when available) to segregate items into separate categories. The model provides a mechanistic account of category learning within a test session. It demonstrates how categorization arises as the product of an inextricable interaction between the subject (the infant) and the environment (the stimuli). The computational characteristics of both subject and environment must be considered in conjunction to understand the observed behaviors.     

The Emergence and Stability of the Attentional Bias to Fearful Faces in Infancy

Several studies have shown that at 7 months of age, infants display an attentional bias toward fearful facial expressions. In this study, we analyzed visual attention and heart rate data from a cross‐sectional study with 5‐, 7‐, 9‐, and 11‐month‐old infants (Experiment 1) and visual attention from a longitudinal study with 5‐ and 7‐month‐old infants (Experiment 2) to examine the emergence and stability of the attentional bias to fearful facial expressions. In both experiments, the attentional bias to fearful faces appeared to emerge between 5 and 7 months of age: 5‐month‐olds did not show a difference in disengaging attention from fearful and nonfearful faces, whereas 7‐ and 9‐month‐old infants had a lower probability of disengaging attention from fearful than nonfearful faces. Across the age groups, heart rate (HR) data (Experiment 1) showed a more pronounced and longer‐lasting HR deceleration to fearful than nonfearful expressions. The results are discussed in relation to the development of the perception and experience of fear and the interaction between emotional and attentional processes.     

The Development of Object Construction From Infancy Through Toddlerhood

Early in development, children explore and combine objects in increasingly complex ways. One manual skill, object construction, represents a major shift in how objects are explored relative to other objects. Despite recent connections with cognitive functioning such as spatial skills, the development of object construction ability has rarely been studied and its trajectory has not been adequately described. The purpose of this study was to describe the development of three types of object construction (stacking, nesting, and affixing) across 5 monthly infant visits and 7 monthly toddler visits using a longitudinal design and a large sample size. Infants (10–14 months, n = 131) and toddlers drawn from the infant sample (18–24 months, n = 65) were given sets of age‐appropriate toys each of which elicited at least one type of constructive play. We described success at different construction tasks and identified trends for construction skill for infant and toddler development using multilevel modeling. We found that each of the three construction actions developed in unique ways across the 10‐ to 24‐month period. Infant construction skill predicted the development of toddler skill, but toddler construction skill diverged from infant trajectories. We discuss the role of combination strategies in the development of object construction skill and how object construction could be related to other domains of development.     

Development of Multimodal Processing in Infancy

A number of studies have investigated infants' abilities to extract and discriminate number from multimodal events. These results have been mixed for several possible reasons, including aspects of the experimental design that provide perceptual cues that are unrelated to number, and are known to influence looking preferences. This experiment used a preferential looking paradigm to investigate whether 6‐ to 9‐month‐old infants can extract the amodal property of number from an arbitrarily related multimodal event sequence when nonnumerical confounds are removed. Results demonstrate that female infants discriminate number from a multimodal presentation by 6 months, whereas males do so by 8 months. Further, the study underscores the importance of controlling for low‐level perceptual cues in looking time experiments aimed at examining infants' cognitive abilities.     

The Developmental Life Course Perspective: A Conceptual and Organizing Framework for Human Behavior and the Social Environment

The developmental life course perspective (DLC) focuses attention on the socio-historical context in which we live our lives as it influences opportunities and life events that produce cumulative advantage or disadvantage. These large contextual forces shape preference and behavior, and it is within this context that the individual exerts personal agency. This perspective has particular utility as a conceptual framework for human behavior and the social environment courses as it integrates individual-level behavior within a social forces context. This article describes the DLC and its application as both a conceptual and an organizing framework for human behavior and the social environment courses at the masters level. It is illustrated with a case example.     

Attentional Engagement in Infancy: The Interactive Influence of Attentional Inertia and Attentional State

We evaluated the interactive influences of attentional state and attentional inertia on infants' level of attentional engagement. We assessed infants' distraction latencies longitudinally at 6.5 and 9 months as they explored toys, and we coded both their attentional state (focused vs. casual) and how long they had been looking at the toy at each distractor onset. Consistent with previous results, both attentional state and attentional inertia contributed to differences in distraction latency. Importantly, the level of attentional engagement was interactively determined by attentional state and attentional inertia. Infants were most resistant to distraction when they were judged to be in a state of focused attention following relatively long looks to the toy, and they were equivalently less resistant to distraction under all other conditions. These results are consistent with a general conceptualization of attentional engagement resulting from the interaction of multiple processes.     

The Science of Infancy: Academic,Social, and Political Agendas

The effectiveness of researchers in infancy is conditioned by their participation in 3 agendas. The academic agenda is devoted to the question of understanding infants, the social agenda is devoted to the question of how to improve the life of infants, and the political agenda is devoted to finding the resources for both understanding and improvement. Amplification is provided for each agenda with attention to the evolution of theoretical frameworks used by infancy researchers.     

Categorical Perception of Facial Emotions in Infancy

Categorical perception, indicated by superior discrimination between stimuli that cross categorical boundaries than between stimuli within a category, is an efficient manner of classification. The current study examined the development of categorical perception of emotional stimuli in infancy. We used morphed facial images to investigate whether infants find contrasts between emotional facial images that cross categorical boundaries to be more salient than those that do not, while matching the degree of differences in the two contrasts. Five‐month‐olds exhibited sensitivity to the categorical boundary between sadness and disgust, between happiness and surprise, as well as between sadness and anger but not between anger and disgust. Even 9‐month‐olds failed to exhibit evidence of a definitive category boundary between anger and disgust. These findings indicate the presence of discrete boundaries between some, but not all, of the basic emotions early in life. Implications of these findings for the major theories of emotion representation are discussed.     

Emergence of Selective Social Referencing in Infancy

Seven and 10‐month‐old infants were presented with a remote‐controlled toy dog that intermittently barked at 30‐sec intervals as they faced an experimenter who either attended to them (look toward condition) or looked away (look away condition). Seven‐month‐old infants' looking toward the experimenter was significantly greater after the dog barking events compared to before regardless of experimental condition. In contrast, 10‐month‐old infants' looks were significantly greater after the barking events compared to before only when the experimenter was attending to them. These results suggest that by 10 months infants monitor and refer to people in an ambiguous situation depending on their attention toward them. This development is viewed as indexing the emergence of an intentional stance in social referencing by 10 months of age.     

The Development of Specialized Processing of Own‐Race Faces in Infancy

In this study, we examined developmental changes in infants' processing of own‐ versus other‐race faces. Caucasian American 8‐month‐olds (Experiment 1) and 4‐month‐olds (Experiment 2) were tested in a habituation‐switch procedure designed to assess holistic (attending to the relationship between internal and external features of the face) versus featural (attending to individual features of the face) processing of faces. Eight‐month‐olds demonstrated holistic processing of upright own‐race (Caucasian) faces, but featural processing of upright other‐race (African) faces. Inverted faces were processed featurally, regardless of ethnicity. Four‐month‐olds, however, demonstrated holistic processing of both Caucasian and African upright faces. These results demonstrate that infants' processing of own‐ versus other‐race faces becomes specialized between 4 and 8 months.     

The Trajectory of Concurrent Motor and Vocal Behaviors Over the Transition to Crawling in Infancy

To document the trajectory of motor and vocal behaviors in real and developmental time, we observed infants at each of four biweekly naturalistic play sessions over the transition to crawling. An exhaustive and mutually exclusive coding scheme documented all vocalizations and postures. Odds ratios of the likelihood of a given posture‐vocalization dyad revealed that vocalization and crawling were significantly unlikely to co‐occur at the session marking the onset of crawling. We speculate that infants’ allocation of attention over the transition to crawling prompted behavioral trade‐offs. During mastery of a novel skill, infants may have had difficulty allocating attention to multiple tasks, but with experience, a decrease in attentional load for the new skill allowed performance of simultaneous behaviors in other domains to occur.     

Infancy and Childhood in India: A Critical Review

Empirical studies of childhood in India have been rare. Guided by universalistic theories of child development, developmental psychologists have seldom examined cultural variations in child-rearing patterns with Indian samples. Psychoanalytic studies of Hindu childhood have been influenced by therapeutic observations with segmented middle-class populations that are generally Westernized and educated, inviting a lively debate about the transferability of psychoanalytic individualism to non-Western contexts. Anthropological studies, invariably focused on cultural variation, have not searched for consistent cultural patterns in ethnographic materials on Hindu socialization. Based on fieldwork conducted in a village near Delhi, this article presents one of the first systematic quantitative and ethnographic studies of patterns of child care in Hindu extended families during the preschool years. The findings are discussed in terms of achieving a consensus between developmental, psychoanalytic, and anthropological observations of Indian childhood.     

Oculomotor Exploration of Impossible Figures in Early Infancy

Previous studies have revealed that young infants can distinguish between displays of possible or impossible figures, which may require detection of inconsistent depth relations among local line junctions that disrupt global object configurations. Here, we used an eye‐tracking paradigm to record eye movements in young infants during an object discrimination task with matched pairs of possible and impossible figures. Our goal was to identify differential patterns of oculomotor activity as infants viewed pictures of possible and impossible objects. We predicted that infants would actively attend to specific pictorial depth cues that denote shape (e.g., T‐junctions), and in the context of an impossible figure that they would fixate to a greater extent in anomalous regions of the display relative to other parts. By the age of 4 months, infants fixated reliably longer overall on displays of impossible versus possible cubes, specifically within the critical region where the incompatible lines and irreconcilable depth relations were located, implying an early capacity for selective attention to critical line junction information and integration of local depth cues necessary to perceive object coherence.     

An Outcome Study of Career Decision Self‐Efficacy and Indecision in an Undergraduate Constructivist Career Course

This study explored outcomes in a constructivist career course. Using a pretest‐ posttest design, the authors assessed the empowerment (operationalized as career decision self‐efficacy) and career indecision of 82 culturally diverse college students at a large, midwestern university. Data were analyzed using a multivariate analysis of variance. Results indicated that students reported significant increases in empowerment with no commensurate decreases in career indecision. In addition to shedding light on the nuanced relationship between empowerment or career decision self‐efficacy and indecision, results indicate the potential constructivist career development has to empower culturally diverse college students.     

The Developmental Perspective in Social Work

The developmental perspective is attracting more attention today as conventional residual and institutional approaches to social welfare lose appeal. This article explains the need to adopt a developmental perspective, traces its history, describes its key features, and outlines implications for social work education with reference to the educational needs of a new century.