cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.17910/b7np4k
title: Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants

description: Learners rely on a combination of experience-independent and experience-dependent mechanisms to extract information from the environment. Language acquisition involves both types of mechanisms, but most theorists emphasize the relative importance of experience-independent mechanisms. The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds. Moreover, this word segmentation was based on statistical learning from only 2 minutes of exposure, suggesting that infants have access to a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical properties of the language input.
DOI: 10.17910/b7j01m
title: Children use syntax to learn verb meanings

description: Verb learning is clearly a function of observation of real-world contingencies; however, it is argued that such observational information is insufficient to account fully for vocabulary acquisition. This paper provides an experimental validation of Landau & Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure; namely, that children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. Pairs of actions were presented simultaneously with a nonsense verb in one of two syntactic structures. The actions were subsequently separated, and the children (MA = 2;1) were asked to select which action was the referent for the verb. The children's choice of referent was found to be a function of the syntactic structure in which the verb had appeared.
DOI: 10.17910/b7d594
title: Cultural transmission of social essentialism

description: Social essentialism entails the belief that certain social categories (e.g., gender, race) mark fundamentally distinct kinds of people. Essentialist beliefs have pernicious consequences, supporting social stereotyping and contributing to prejudice. How does social essentialism develop? In the studies reported here, we tested the hypothesis that generic language facilitates the cultural transmission of social essentialism. Two studies found that hearing generic language about a novel social category diverse for race, ethnicity, age, and sex led 4-y-olds and adults to develop essentialist beliefs about that social category. A third study documented that experimentally inducing parents to hold essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led them to produce more generic language when discussing the category with their children. Thus, generic language facilitates the transmission of essentialist beliefs about social categories from parents to children.
DOI: 10.17910/b78g6v
title: Different Gestalt processing for different actions? Comparing object-directed reaching and looking time measures

description: Six experiments compared the Gestalt processing that mediates infant reaching and looking behaviors. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the positioning and timing of 8- and 9-month-olds' reaching was influenced by remembered relative motion. Experiment 2 suggested that a visible gap, without this relative motion, was not sufficient to produce these effects. Experiment 3 found that 6- and 7-month-olds required both remembered relative motion and a continuously visible gap to affect reaching; when two separate objects were placed adjacent to one another, they were treated as though they were connected. Experiments 4 and 5, using a looking time measure, identified a dissociation between looking and reaching performance. In Experiment 6, 6- and 7-month-olds' reaching was influenced when display parts differed in shape and color. In these experiments, Gestalt processing for looking was more influenced by remembered information than was Gestalt processing for reaching. For reaching, a low weighting of separation cues was also apparent.
DOI: 10.17910/b74s3k
title: Examples of rhythmical stereotypical behaviors at 4 and 7 months

description: One female infant is shown in two clips displaying rhythmic stereotypical behaviors at 4 months of age (1 minute) and at 7 months of age (2 minutes). The second clip shows her alternating between rhythmic movements of the hands and attempts at voluntary grasping with one hand.
DOI: 10.17910/b7101z
title: Cortical responses to optic flow and motion contrast across patterns and speeds

description: Motion provides animals with fast and robust cues for navigation and object detection. In the first case, stereotyped patterns of optic flow inform a moving observer about the direction and speed of its own movement. In the case of object detection, regional differences in motion allow for the segmentation of figures from their background, even in the absence of color or shading cues. Previous research has investigated human electrophysiological responses to global motion across speeds, but only focused upon one type of optic flow pattern. Here, we compared steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) responses across patterns and speeds, both for optic flow and for motion-defined figure patterns, to assess the extent to which the processes are pattern-general or pattern-specific. For optic flow, pattern and speed effects on response amplitudes varied substantially across channels, suggesting pattern-specific processing at slow speeds and pattern-general activity at fast speeds. Responses for coherence- and direction-defined figures were comparatively more uniform, with similar response profiles and spatial distributions. Self- and object-motion patterns activate some of the same circuits, but these data suggest differential sensitivity: not only across the two classes of motion, but also across the patterns within each class, and across speeds. Thus, the results demonstrate that cortical processing of global motion is complex and activates a distributed network.
DOI: 10.17910/b7w884
title: Biological Motions

description: The structure of the human form is quickly and unequivocably recognized from 10 to 13 points of light moving as if attached to the major joints and head of a person walking Recent psychophysical and computational models of this process suggest that these displays are organized by low-level processing constraints that delimit the pair-wise connections of the point lights In the current research, these low-level constraints were rendered uninformative by a masking paradigm The results from four experiments converged to show that the perception of structure in a point-light walker display does not require the prior detection of individual features or local relations. (Excerpts 2-5)
DOI: 10.17910/b7rg66
title: Phenomenal permanence and the development of predictive tracking in infancy

description: The perceived spatiotemporal continuity of objects depends on the way they appear and disappear as they move in the spatial layout. This study investigated whether infants' predictive tracking of a briefly occluded object is sensitive to the manner by which the object disappears and reappears. Five-, 7-, and 9-month-old infants were shown a ball rolling across a visual scene and briefly disappearing via kinetic occlusion, instantaneous disappearance, implosion, or virtual occlusion. Three different measures converged to show that predictive tracking increased with age and that infants were most likely to anticipate the reappearance of the ball following kinetic occlusion. These results suggest that infants' knowledge of the permanence and nonpermanence of objects is embodied in their predictive tracking. (Excerpts 1-4) The stimuli presented below were modified from the original stimuli. For further reference, see: Bertenthal, B. I. (2008). Perception and action. M. M. Haith & J. B. Benson (Eds.). Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development. San Diego: Elsevier/Academic Press. (Excerpts 1-4) Bertenthal, B. I., Gredebäck, G., & Boyer, T. W. (2012). Differential contributions of development and learning to infants’ knowledge of object continuity and discontinuity. Child Development. Child Development, 84, 413-421.
DOI: 10.17910/b7ms3x
title: When do infants begin to follow a point?

description: Infants’ understanding of a pointing gesture represents a major milestone in their communicative development. The current consensus is that infants are not capable of following a pointing gesture until 9–12 months of age. In this article, we present evidence from 4- and 6-month-old infants challenging this conclusion. Infants were tested with a spatial cueing paradigm in Experiment 1 (500-ms stimulus-target onset asynchrony [SOA]) and Experiment 2 (100-ms SOA). The results revealed that the younger infants shifted their attention in the cued direction when presented with a pointing gesture and with a foil (i.e., same size and shape as pointing gesture) at both SOAs. Older infants shifted their attention only in response to the pointing gesture at 100-ms SOA. Experiment 3 tested infants’ preferences for the social stimulus (i.e., pointing gesture) relative to the foil and a non-social stimulus (i.e., an arrow). The results revealed that infants are biased to selectively attend to the pointing gesture. Taken together, these results suggest that 4- and 6-month-old infants are capable of preferentially selecting and following a pointing gesture. It is theorized that this early capacity assists infants in their developing understanding of triadic forms of communication.
DOI: 10.17910/b7h019
title: Scale errors offer evidence for a perception-action dissociation early in life

description: We report a perception-action dissociation in the behavior of normally developing young children. In adults and older children, the perception of an object and the organization of actions on it are seamlessly integrated. However, as documented here, 18- to 30-month-old children sometimes fail to use information about object size and make serious attempts to perform impossible actions on miniature objects. They try, for example, to sit in a dollhouse chair or to get into a small toy car. We interpret scale errors as reflecting problems with inhibitory control and with the integration of visual information for perception and action.
DOI: 10.17910/b7c88g
title: An eye tracking investigation of developmental change in bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes
DOI: 10.17910/b77g6j
title: Teach to reach: The effects of active vs. passive reaching experiences on action and perception

description: Reaching is an important and early emerging motor skill that allows infants to interact with the physical and social world. However, few studies have considered how reaching experiences shape infants’ own motor development and their perception of actions performed by others. In the current study, two groups of infants received daily parent guided play sessions over a 2-weeks training period. Using ‘‘Sticky Mittens”, one group was enabled to independently pick up objects whereas the other group only passively observed their parent’s actions on objects. Following training, infants’ manual and visual exploration of objects, agents, and actions in a live and a televised context were assessed. Our results showed that only infants who experienced independent object apprehension advanced in their reaching behavior, and showed changes in their visual exploration of agents and objects in a live setting. Passive observation was not sufficient to change infants’ behavior. To our surprise, the effects of the training did not seem to generalize to a televised observation context. Together, our results suggest that early motor training can jump-start infants’ transition into reaching and inform their perception of others’ actions.
DOI: 10.17910/b73s38
title: Stable individual differences in number discrimination in infancy

description: Previous studies have shown that as a group 6-month-old infants successfully discriminate numerical changes when the values differ by at least a 1:2 ratio but fail at a 2:3 ratio (e.g. 8 vs. 16 but not 8 vs. 12). However, no studies have yet examined individual differences in number discrimination in infancy. Using a novel numerical change detection paradigm, we present more direct evidence that infants’ numerical perception is ratio-dependent even within the range of discriminable ratios and thus adheres to Weber’s Law. Furthermore, we show that infants’ numerical discrimination at 6 months reliably predicts their numerical discrimination abilities but not visual short-term memory at 9 months. Thus, individual differences in numerical discrimination acuity may be stable within the first year of life and provide important avenues for future longitudinal research exploring the relationship between infant numerical discrimination and later developing math achievement.
DOI: 10.17910/b7001n
title: Visual Motion Priors Differ for Infants and Mothers

description: Visual motion direction ambiguities due to edge-aperture interaction might be resolved by speed priors, but scant empirical data support this hypothesis. We measured optic flow and gaze positions of walking mothers and the infants they carried. Empirically derived motion priors for infants are vertically elongated and shifted upward relative to mothers. Skewed normal distributions fitted to estimated retinal speeds peak at values above 20 deg/sec.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.70
title: Arnold Gesell’s Films of Infant and Child Development

description: This volume contains a portion of digitized reels of raw footage stored at the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology documenting Arnold Gesell’s research, dating from the 1910s through the 1940s. The collection includes films of infants and children performing tasks that had not previously been captured in moving images. Many of the filmed tasks represent Gesell’s “stages" of development, such as infants learning to roll over, using a spoon, stacking blocks, or manipulating rings and pellets. We are continuing to add clips to this volume on a continuous basis. Sharing of this material with anyone other than the authorized researcher and his or her immediate collaborators requires permission from The Cummings Center for the History of Psychology. Requests for sharing will be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Please contact ahap@uakron.edu for the Access Policy and Permission to Use Moving Images.
DOI: 10.17910/b7v88t
title: Motion Coherence Thresholds for Adult Participants Viewing Different Patterns of Optic Flow

description: In adults, radial optic flow evokes stronger brain activity than laminar or rotational flow. Optic flow also evokes different activation patterns depending on motion speed (Fesi et al., 2014). This study examined whether the detection of optic flow in adult observers varies by pattern and speed in ways consistent with prior physiological evidence. Adult observers (n=10; 19.2-22.2 years, M=21.4) viewed two side-by-side, time varying (1.2 Hz coherent/incoherent cycle) annular shaped (18 deg outer/5 deg inner diameter) optic flow displays at a viewing distance of 60 cm. One display depicted random (0% coherent) motion while the other depicted radial or translational motion at one of four fixed coherence levels (5, 10, 15 or 20%). Observers fixated centrally and judged which side contained coherent motion, indicating the choice by a keypress. Within a single run, speed was either 2 or 8 deg/s. Between 2 and 4 runs were collected per participant in a single visit. We analyzed proportion correct and response times using generalized mixed effects modeling in R. As predicted, proportion correct judgments increased with motion coherence, and the response time of correct judgments declined. There were no statistically significant differences in proportion correct judgments by speed or pattern type; however, a significant coherence by pattern interaction, p&lt; .0001, indicated that observers more readily detect low coherence laminar flows than radial ones. Reaction time data suggest that observers are faster to detect laminar patterns, p&lt; .0001, and slow (2 deg/s) speeds, p&lt; .001. Taken together the results suggest that sensitivity to detect optic flow in noise varies by pattern type and speed, in ways partially consistent with prior physiological results.
DOI: 10.17910/b7ks3m
title: The Salience of Lower-Order, Localized Features in Highly Self-Similar Wallpaper Groups

description: There exists an abundance of visual symmetry within our environment. Yet research on human perception has almost exclusively been limited to studies of a single type of symmetry— two-fold reflection—leaving uncertainty about human perceptual sensitivity to the other types of symmetry as derived from the mathematics of Group Theory. Clarke et al. (2011) found that five of the seventeen wallpaper groups—P1, P3M1, P31M, P6, and P6M—have a high degree of self-similarity, as determined by the frequency with which participants grouped random-dot noise representations of the same wallpaper group together. The current study attempts to replicate Clarke et al. (2011) in a limited form. Here, we sought to understand the salience of lower-order features within each of five wallpaper groups, and concordantly, their impact on symmetry detection. Adult participants were presented with twenty exemplars of each of the five aforementioned wallpaper groups and instructed to sort them into as many subsets as they wished based on any criteria they saw appropriate. Participants were then surveyed on the methods they used to classify these images. Analysis suggest several factors—including contrast and presence of salient secondary structures—influence the detection of symmetry in wallpaper groups.
DOI: 10.17910/b7g010
title: Amnesia for object attributes: Failure to report attended information that had just reached conscious awareness

description: We intuitively believe that when we become consciously aware of a visual stimulus, we will be able to remember it for immediate report. The present study provides a series of striking demonstrations that are inconsistent with such an intuition. Four experiments showed that in certain conditions, participants cannot report an attribute (e.g. letter identity) of a stimulus, even when that attribute had been attended and reached a full state of conscious awareness just prior to the question. We term this effect attribute amnesia and it occurs when participants locate a target using one attribute for several repetitions and are then surprisingly asked to report that attribute. This discovery suggests that attention to a stimulus attribute and being aware of it are insufficient to ensure its reportability immediately afterwards. Furthermore, our results strongly imply that cognitive processes have separate designations of what information will be attended and what will be remembered.
DOI: 10.17910/b7988v
title: Natural scene statistics of visual experience across development and culture

description: Human infants undergo significant changes in body size, posture, and locomotor capability over the first several years of life. As a result, the statistics of visual motion infant observers experience differ from adults in some situations. We ask whether these differences apply more generally, and if so, what factors account for them. In one analysis, we simulate the effects of changes in body posture, speed of locomotion, and surface geometry on motion statistics. In a second analysis, we empirically measure the statistics of visual motion experienced by observers across the first year of life using infant-perspective videos captured during episodes when infants were moving through space or were stationary. We include samples of infants in from North America and those from India, to assess how variations in cultural practices influence infants' visual experiences. We find that fast laminar motion patterns dominate the visual input young infants experience and that cultural differences play a small role in shaping visual motion experiences.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.83
title: Infant and mother natural locomotion and gait: Spanish-speaking, low income families

description: Infants and their mothers engaged in spontaneous locomotor play in a laboratory playroom. Infants were also tested on measures of standard gait and videotaped while their mothers fed them in a high chair. Families were primarily Spanish speaking and low-income.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.84
title: Motor decisions are not black and white: Selecting actions in the “gray zone”

description: In many situations, multiple actions are possible to achieve a goal. How do people select a particular action among equally possible alternatives? In six experiments, we determined whether action selection is consistent and biased toward one decision by observing participants’ decisions to go over or under a horizontal bar set at varying heights. We assessed the height at which participants transitioned from going over to under the bar within a “gray zone”—the range of bar heights at which going over and under were both possible. In Experiment 1, participants’ transition points were consistently located near the upper boundary of the gray zone, indicating a bias to go over rather than under the bar. Moreover, transitional behaviors were clustered tightly into a small region, indicating that decisions were highly consistent. Subsequent experiments examined potential influences on action selection. In Experiment 2, participants wore ankle weights to increase the cost of going over the bar. In Experiment 3, they were tested on a padded surface that made crawling under the bar more comfortable. In Experiment 4, we introduced a secondary task that required participants to crawl immediately after navigating the bar. None of these manipulations altered participants’ decisions relative to Experiment 1. In Experiment 5, participants started in a crawling position, which led to significantly lower transition points. In Experiment 6, we tested 5- to 6-year-old children as in Experiment 1 to determine the effects of social pressure on action selection. Children displayed lower transition points, larger transition regions, and reduced ability to go over the bar compared to adults. Across experiments, results indicate that adults have a strong and robust bias for upright locomotion.
DOI: 10.17910/b75k5k
title: Excerpt volume: Crawling procedure & locomotor history

description: Crawling Example 1: Experimenter carrying baby, mom and experimenter at end of walkway, soft carpet crawling surface. Illustrates use of toys to lure baby. Experimenters are particularly talented. Crawling Example 2: Experimenter carrying baby, mom at end of walkway, gridded high-density foam surface. Example of how to run crawling gait when only one experimenter is available. Crawling Example 3: Experimenter carrying baby, mom and experimenter at end of walkway, gridded high-density foam surface, infant wearing head-mounted eye tracker. Locomotor histories correspond to pdf's by Subject #. Note how experimenter clearly defines the criteria over and over. She zeroes in on the correct age through a "negotiation" with the parent. If parent gives an age, experimenter returns with a date. If parent offers a date, experimenter returns with an age. Then experimenter tries to get parent to remember specific event when baby was walking/cruising/crawling (a holiday, birthday, special outing). Blank form for entering parent's report about the baby's locomotion. Date fields on the right provide a "cheat sheet" so that the experimenter can quickly translate dates into ages and ages into dates. Excerpt of testing sitting proficiency: experimenter tests number of seconds the baby is able to maintain upright posture with hands up in the air while doing a long sit and a short sit. Experimenter also tests sitting balance using the Segmental Assessment of Trunk Control (SATCo).