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The model examines the looking-learning behavior of infants as young as 6 weeks through one year of age, through 4,800 simulations at various points in development involving multiple stimuli and tasks. As would be expected, most infants introduced to new objects tend to look at them to gather information about them; once they do, they are “biased” to look away from them in search of something new

an infant will linger on something that’s being shown to it for the first time as it learns about it, and that the “total looking time” will decrease as the infant becomes more familiar with it.

infants who don’t spend a sufficient amount of time studying a new object—in effect, failing to learn about it and to catalog that knowledge into memory—don’t catch on as well, which can affect their learning later on.

Sammy Perone, a post-doctoral researcher in psychology at the UI and corresponding author on the pape

To examine why infants need to dwell on objects to learn about them, the researchers created two different models. One model learned in a "responsive" world: Every time the model looked away from a new object, the object was jiggled to get the model to look at it again. The other model learned in a "nonresponsive" world: when this model looked at a new object, objects elsewhere were jiggled to distract it. The results showed that the responsive models“learned about new objects more robustly, more quickly, and are better learners in the end,

infants can familiarize themselves with new objects, and store them into memory well enough that when shown them again, they quickly recognized them

“if that’s the case, we can manipulate and change what the brain is doing” to aid infants born prematurely or who have special needs, Perone adds.

Jason Babcock is the founder of Positive Science, a New York company that has developed eye-tracking devices over the last decade

John Franchak, a doctoral student at NYU and leader of the project

infants would be looking at their mothers constantly because that was common knowledge within [the field of] social cognition with infants." But in a room full of toys scattered everywhere and obstacles to climb on and crawl on, the infants only looked toward their mothers about half the time.  And even if they did look at their mothers, they looked at their mothers' faces only about 15 percent of the time.

toddlers almost always look directly at the object when reaching for it.

Toddlers are able to use information from their peripheral vision and still walk very well.

Another interesting finding was that while infants look directly at an obstacle before walking onto or over it, 75 percent of the time they don't always have to.

According to Franchak, down the line it could offer more research applications that could help infants with developmental disorders, medical research and applied research.   

ested the learning abilities of sleeping newborns by repeating tones that were followed by a gentle puff of air to the eyelids.

After about 20 minutes, 24 of the 26 babies squeezed their eyelids together when the tone was sounded without the puff of air.

The brain waves of the 24 infants were found to change, providing a neural measurement of memory updating.

While past studies find this type of learning can occur in infants who are awake, this is the first study to document it in their most frequent state, while they are asleep

Learned eyelid movement reflects the normal functioning of the circuitry in the cerebellum, a neural structure at the base of the brain. This study's method potentially offers a unique non-invasive tool for early identification of infants with atypical cerebellar structure, who are potentially at risk for a range of developmental disorders, including autism and dyslexia, she said.

Newborn infants' sleep patterns are quite different than those of older children or adults in that they show more active sleep where heart and breathing rates are very changeable," she said. "It may be this sleep state is more amenable to experiencing the world in a way that facilitates learning."

Another factor is that infants' brains have greater neural plasticity, which is the ability for the neural connections to be changed

children do think before they speak.

absorb the movements that match basic sounds

first birthdays, babies start shifting back to look you in the eye again

University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray, who also studies speech development.

quality face-time with your tot is very important for speech development – more than, say, turning on the latest baby DVD.

Other studies have shown that babies who are best at distinguishing between vowel sounds like "ah" and "ee" shortly before their first birthday wind up with better vocabularies and pre-reading skills by kindergarten.

babies also look to speakers' faces for important social cues about what they're hearing

So he and doctoral student Amy Hansen-Tift tested nearly 180 babies, groups of them at ages 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 months. How? They showed videos of a woman speaking in English or Spanish to babies of English speakers. A gadget mounted on a soft headband tracked where each baby was focusing his or her gaze and for how long.

They found a dramatic shift in attention: When the speaker used English, the 4-month-olds gazed mostly into her eyes. The 6-month-olds spent equal amounts of time looking at the eyes and the mouth. The 8- and 10-month-olds studied mostly the mouth.

At 12 months, attention started shifting back toward the speaker's eyes.

at 6 months, babies begin observing lip movement, Lewkowicz says, because that's about the time babies' brains gain the ability to control their attention rather than automatically look toward noise.

Duke University cognitive neuroscientist Greg Appelbaum