Psychobiological Aspects of Infant Crying

This study addresses the relationship between the amount of infant crying and maternal responsiveness to the infant's facial communicative cues during distress and non-distress situations. From an evolutionary perspective, the interpretation of infant crying as a communicative signal is preferred over its distance-regulating function. This view implies a relation between the amount of infant crying and parameters describing interactional regulation. Maternal responsiveness is operationalized by (a) the contingent reactions in a latency time span which define the intuitive character of parental behaviours (200–800 ms) and by (b) an event-based coding system of maternal inappropriate behaviour. Infant states (crying, fussing, sleeping and waking hours) were assessed by means of diaries kept by the mothers. In two samples (N=10, N=13, respectively), married, middle-class mothers were videotaped in free play situations with their healthy, firstborn children in their family homes. Results show that there is a strong intersituational consistency of maternal behaviour, but context-sensitive components of maternal behaviour could also be found. The contingency of maternal reactions during the free play situation can be regarded as a predictor of the duration of the infant's crying measured by a maternal diary. The whole pattern of the results confirms the regulatory function of infant crying in the context of early caregiver–child interactions.     

How parallel is visual processing in the ventral pathway?

Visual object perception is usually studied by presenting one object at a time at the fovea. However, the world around us is composed of multiple objects. The way our visual system deals with this complexity has remained controversial in the literature. Some models claim that the ventral pathway, a set of visual cortical areas responsible for object recognition, can process only one or very few objects at a time without ambiguity. Other models argue in favor of a massively parallel processing of objects in a scene. Recent experiments in monkeys have provided important data about this issue. The ventral pathway seems to be able to perform complex analyses on several objects simultaneously, but only during a short time period. Subsequently only one or very few objects are explicitly selected and consciously perceived. Here, we survey the implications of these new findings for our understanding of object processing.