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Developmental Psychology

Alyson J. Chroust

Selected Works

Infancy

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Psychology

The Whole Picture: Holistic Body Posture Recognition In Infancy, Alyson J. Hock, Hannah White, Rachel Jubran, Ramesh S. Bhatt Mar 2016

The Whole Picture: Holistic Body Posture Recognition In Infancy, Alyson J. Hock, Hannah White, Rachel Jubran, Ramesh S. Bhatt

Alyson J. Chroust

Holistic processing is tied to expertise and is characteristic of face and body perception by adults. Infants process faces holistically, but it is unknown whether they process body information holistically. In the present study, infants were tested for discrimination between body postures that differed in limb orientations in three conditions: in the context of the whole body, with just the isolated limbs that changed orientation, or with the limbs in the context of scrambled body parts. Five- and 9-month-olds discriminated between whole-body postures, but failed in the isolated-part and scrambled-body conditions, demonstrating holistic processing of information from bodies. These results …


The Development Of Sex Category Representation In Infancy: Matching Of Faces And Bodies, Alyson J. Chroust, Ashley Kangas, Nicole Zieber, Ramesh S. Bhatt Feb 2015

The Development Of Sex Category Representation In Infancy: Matching Of Faces And Bodies, Alyson J. Chroust, Ashley Kangas, Nicole Zieber, Ramesh S. Bhatt

Alyson J. Chroust

Sex is a significant social category, and adults derive information about it from both faces and bodies. Research indicates that young infants process sex category information in faces. However, no prior study has examined whether infants derive sex categories from bodies and match faces and bodies in terms of sex. In the current study, 5-month-olds exhibited a preference between sex congruent (face and body of the same sex) versus sex-incongruent (face and body belonging to different genders) images. In contrast, 3.5-month-olds failed to exhibit a preference. Thus, 5-month-olds process sex information from bodies and match it to facial information. However, …


Perceptual Specialization And Configural Face Processing In Infancy, Nicole Zieber, Ashley Kangas, Alyson J. Hock, Angela Hayden, Rebecca Collins, Henrietta Bada, Jane E. Joseph, Ramesh S. Bhatt Oct 2013

Perceptual Specialization And Configural Face Processing In Infancy, Nicole Zieber, Ashley Kangas, Alyson J. Hock, Angela Hayden, Rebecca Collins, Henrietta Bada, Jane E. Joseph, Ramesh S. Bhatt

Alyson J. Chroust

Adults’ face processing expertise includes sensitivity to second-order configural information (spatial relations among features such as distance between eyes). Prior research indicates that infants process this information in female faces. In the current experiments, 9-month-olds discriminated spacing changes in upright human male and monkey faces but not in inverted faces. However, they failed to process matching changes in upright house stimuli. A similar pattern of performance was exhibited by 5-month-olds. Thus, 5- and 9-month-olds exhibited specialization by processing configural information in upright primate faces but not in houses or inverted faces. This finding suggests that, even early in life, infants …