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“We worry a lot about zoonoses, the transmission of diseases from animals to people,” said Christiane Loehr, a professor at the OSU College of Veterinary Medicine. “But most people don’t realize that humans can also pass diseases to animals, and this raises questions and concerns about mutations, new viral forms and evolving diseases that may potentially be zoonotic. And, of course, there is concern about the health of the animals.”

H1N1 (“swine flu“) and H5N1 (“bird flu”)

The first recorded instance, described in an article published by the team in Veterinary Pathology, took place in Oregon in 2009.

While a cat owner was hospitalized with H1N1, both of her cats (which stayed indoors and had no contact with other sick people or animals) came down with flu-like symptoms and eventually died. A postmortem analysis of their lungs and nasal cavities turned up the H1N1 virus

“It’s reasonable to assume there are many more cases of this than we know about, and we want to learn more,” Loehr said.

“Any time you have infection of a virus into a new species, it’s a concern, a black box of uncertainty,” Loehr noted.

this news might trigger immediate concern,

the flu could be passed from human to pet, mutate into a more dangerous form,

“We don’t know for sure what the implications might be, but we do think this deserves more attention.”

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.   

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.

C-section babies have a pattern of "at risk" microorganisms in their gastrointestinal tract that may make them more susceptible to developing the antibody Immunoglobulin E, or IgE,