Individual differences in changes in infants’ interest in social signals in relation to developmental index

Prenatal Exposure to a Polychlorinated Biphenyl (PCB) Congener Influences Fixation Duration on Biological Motion at 4-Months-Old: A Preliminary Study

“…This preference for upright BM stimuli is impaired in infants with a high risk of autistic disorders [46], [47], and in developmentally-delayed infants [50]. Taken together with these previous findings, the abnormal preferential looking pattern we observed in four-month-olds with high level of prenatal PCB exposure indicates that prenatal PCB exposure may have adverse effects on early social development.…”

“…In addition, a series of studies by Klin et al reported abnormal fixation patterns and preferences for upright and inverted BM stimuli in infants with high risk of autism [46], [47], a developmental disorder characterized by the severe deficiencies in social communication skills including the deficiency in BM perception [48]. Thus, deficiencies in BM processing in early development may constitute a hallmark symptom of socio-cognitive development [46], [47], [49], [50].…”

Preference for Dynamic Human Images and Gaze‐Following Abilities in Preterm Infants at 6 and 12 Months of Age: An Eye‐Tracking Study

“…Additional research is needed to clarify biological motion perception in preterm infants using other stimuli such as scrambled biological motion, which contain the same local motion information but not the form defined by biological motion. Furthermore, using the preferential looking paradigm, a previous study has found that only 9-month-old full-term infants show visual preference for upright biological motion compared with scramble biological motion, but the behavioral characteristic has not been observed in 4-and 18-month-olds (Kutsuki, Kuroki, Egami, Ogurac, & Itakura, 2009), suggesting that the preferential looking paradigm might produce unstable results of biological motion perception. In contrast, Kuhlmeier, Troje, and Lee (2010) have shown that full-term infants at 6 months can discriminate upright and inverted biological motion using habituation paradigm.…”

A categorical approach to infants’ individual differences during the Still-Face paradigm

“…The clustering methods have been successfully employed in infant temperament research (Janson & Mathiesen, 2008), in parenting studies during infancy (Meteyer & Perry-Jenkins, 2009) and in analyses of caregivers' behavior during free interaction (Hofer, Hohenberger, Hauf, & Aschersleben, 2008). This approach was also employed to categorize both infant and maternal gaze direction and vocalization within a play condition (Kawai et al, 2010), infant looking features when presented with different kinds of object-in-motion video stimuli (Kutsuki, Kuroki, Egami, Ogura, & Itakura, 2009), and infants at risk for autism during a video interaction task based on the FFSF paradigm, that is by a TV-video interaction (Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007). In the present study we used cluster analysis to create patterns of individual differences reflecting the infant behaviors during the initial interaction episode of the FFSF paradigm (Play), using cluster membership as the basic unit of analysis for examination of infant and maternal behavior and dyadic coordination across FFSF.…”