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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural cues, such as the relative size and arrangement of parts, are key aspects of adults' representation of human bodies, and they are used to derive significant social information such as age, sex, and attractiveness. Prior studies have not clearly addressed young infants' sensitivity to these body characteristics. In the current experiments, 3.5-month-olds exhibited a preference between images of intact bodies versus those with parts in wrong locations. Infants also discriminated between intact bodies and those with distorted part proportions. In both cases, infants discriminated when images were presented upright but not when they were inverted. These results indicate that infants are sensitive to the arrangement and size of human body parts at least by 3.5 months of age. Thus, contrary to some prior reports, body representation early in life is developed enough to include structural information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined whether infants organize information according to the newly proposed principle of common region, which states that elements within a region are grouped together and separated from those of other regions. In Experiment 1, 6- to 7-month-olds exhibited sensitivity to regions by discriminating between the displacement of an element within a region versus across regions. In Experiments 2 (6- to 7-month-olds) and 3 (3- to 4-month-olds), infants who were habituated to 2 elements in each of 2 regions subsequently discriminated between a familiar and novel grouping in familiar and novel regions. Thus, infants as young as 3 to 4 months of age are not only sensitive to regions in visual images, but also use these regions to group elements in accord with the principle of common region. Because common region analysis is critical to such basic visual functions as figure-ground and object segregation, these results suggest that the organizational mechanism that underlies many vital visual functions is already operational by 3 to 4 months of age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]