Learning Visual Units After Brief Experience in 10‐Month‐Old Infants

How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment investigates 10‐month‐old infants' use of brief prior experiences with objects to visually organize a display consisting of multiple geometrically shaped three‐dimensional blocks created for this study. After a brief exposure to a multipart portion of the display, each infant was shown two test events, one of which preserved the unit the infant had seen and the other of which broke that unit. Overall, infants looked longer at the event that broke the unit they had seen prior to testing than the event that preserved that unit, suggesting that infants made use of the brief prior experience to (a) form a cohesive unit of the multipart portion of the display they saw prior to test and (b) segregate this unit from the rest of the test display. This suggests that infants made inferences about novel parts of the test display based on limited exposure to a subset of the test display. Like adults, infants learn features of the three‐dimensional world through their experiences in it.     

Body talk: somatic countertransference

This article focuses on a clinically observed event: the impact of the analytic session on the corporeality of the psychotherapist. The author sees this as an example of countertransference, in this instance ‘somatic countertransference’. Short and long clinical extracts are used to detail these events. The author touches on some early ideas on somatizing. The Kleinian concept of projective identification is itself explored and then used to explore further the idea of somatic countertransference.     

Stability of deferred imitation in 12- to 18-month-old infants: A closer look into developmental dynamics

Deferred imitation is used to assess declarative memory in infants. Although a lot of studies show that infants from 6 months onwards are able to re-enact actions following a delay, only a few studies describe early declarative memory longitudinally. From a variable-centred approach, these studies found a modest relationship between measurement occasions that increases with age. However, no studies have analysed the differential aspect of memory development from a person-centred perspective. The present study analyses memory stabilities both from a variable-centred and person-centred approach within a sample of N = 87 infants of a 2-wave longitudinal design (12- and 18-month-olds). From a variable-centred perspective, the results indicate that, first, there was a significant increase in infants' memory performance and, second, that although reliable, the stability of infants' memory performance was relatively low. From a person-centred perspective two vs. three groups of infants were differentiated showing different developmental growth trajectories and stability correlations but no differences in language, cognitive and motor development. The implications of those results in terms of further test development are discussed. Furthermore, important methodological expansions for the analysis of infants' memory data are presented and discussed.     

A direct comparison of infants' use of featural and spatiotemporal information when individuating objects in a non-occlusion event-monitoring design

A central issue within the field of object individuation concerns the kind of information that infants rely on when they succeed in individuating objects. By means of the violation-of-expectation strategy, the present study reports a comparison of 8.0- and 6.5-month-old infants' use of featural and spatiotemporal information in a new non-occlusion event-monitoring design. Using a mirror setup the memory demands were minimized, because all apparent changes in the unexpected test events took place in full view of the infants. The results indicate that the 8.0- and 6.5-month-old infants individuated objects successfully regardless of whether they were provided with featural or spatiotemporal information. The results are discussed in relation to the relevant literature.     

The dynamics of intermodal matching: Seven- and 12-month-olds' intermodal matching of affect

The purpose of this experiment was to examine whether and how a common methodological difference frequently employed within the intermodal matching procedure affects infants' intermodal matching. Specifically we examined the effects of incorporating or excluding silent control trials on seven- and 12-month-olds' intermodal matching of affect. Results revealed that seven-month-olds showed reliable matching when presented all in-sound trials whereas 12-month-olds showed reliable matching when half of the trials were presented silently and half of the trials were presented in-sound. Results are discussed in terms of the dynamics of infant attention and those conditions where the inclusion of silent trials may be appropriate.     

Attention to lexical stress and early vocabulary growth in 5-month-olds at risk for autism spectrum disorder

Typically developing infants differentiate strong–weak (trochaic) and weak–strong (iambic) stress patterns by 2 months of age. The ability to discriminate rhythmical patterns, such as lexical stress, has been argued to facilitate language development, suggesting that a difficulty in discriminating stress might affect early word learning as reflected in vocabulary size. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulty in correctly producing lexical stress, yet little is known about how they perceive it. The current study tested 5-month-old infants with typically developing older siblings (SIBS-TD) and infants with an older sibling diagnosed with ASD (SIBS-A) on their ability to differentiate the trochaic and iambic stress patterns of the word form gaba. SIBS-TD infants showed an increased interest in attention to the trochaic stress pattern, which was also positively correlated with vocabulary comprehension at 12 months of age. In contrast, SIBS-A infants attended equally to these stress patterns, although this was unrelated to later vocabulary size.     

Beyond the information given: Infants’ transfer of actions learned through imitation

Five experiments were conducted to investigate infants’ ability to transfer actions learned via imitation to new objects and to examine what components of the original context are critical to such transfer. Infants of 15 months observed an experimenter perform an action with one or two toys and then were offered a novel toy that was not demonstrated for them. In all experiments, infants performed target actions with the novel toy more frequently than infants who were offered the same toy but had seen no prior demonstrations. Infants exhibited transfer even when the specific part to be manipulated looked different across the toys, even when they had not performed the actions with the demonstration toys themselves, even when the actions produced no effects on the demonstrations, and even when the actions were demonstrated with only a single exemplar toy. Transfer was especially robust when infants not only observed but also practiced the target actions on the demonstration trials. Learning action affordances (“means”) seems to be a central aspect of human imitation, and the propensity to apply these learned action affordances in new object contexts may be an important basis for technological innovation and invention.     

Sing that tune: Infants’ perception of melody and lyrics and the facilitation of phonetic recognition in songs

To better understand how infants process complex auditory input, this study investigated whether 11-month-old infants perceive the pitch (melodic) or the phonetic (lyric) components within songs as more salient, and whether melody facilitates phonetic recognition. Using a preferential looking paradigm, uni-dimensional and multi-dimensional songs were tested; either the pitch or syllable order of the stimuli varied. As a group, infants detected a change in pitch order in a 4-note sequence when the syllables were redundant (experiment 1), but did not detect the identical pitch change with variegated syllables (experiment 2). Infants were better able to detect a change in syllable order in a sung sequence (experiment 2) than the identical syllable change in a spoken sequence (experiment 1). These results suggest that by 11 months, infants cannot “ignore” phonetic information in the context of perceptually salient pitch variation. Moreover, the increased phonetic recognition in song contexts mirrors findings that demonstrate advantages of infant-directed speech. Findings are discussed in terms of how stimulus complexity interacts with the perception of sung speech in infancy.