Influence of vocal cues on learning about objects in joint attention contexts

Theta power relates to infant object encoding in naturalistic mother-infant interactions

This study investigates infants' neural and behavioral responses to maternal ostensive signals during naturalistic mother-infant interactions and their effects on object encoding. Mothers familiarized their 9- to 10-month-olds (N = 35, 17 females, mainly White, data collection: 2018-2019) with objects with or without mutual gaze, infant-directed speech, and calling the infant's name. Ostensive signals focused infants' attention on objects and their mothers. Infant theta activity synchronized and alpha activity desynchronized during interactions compared to a nonsocial resting phase (Cohen' d: 0.49-0.75). Yet, their amplitudes were unrelated to maternal ostensive signals. Ostensive signals did not facilitate object encoding. However, higher infant theta power during encoding predicted better subsequent object recognition. Results strengthen the role of theta-band power for early learning processes.

Early triadic interactions in the first year of life: a systematic review on object-mediated shared encounters

Infants' early interactions with adults and everyday objects are key to socio-communicative development, but their emergence and development are still under debate. Aiming at describing the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches on triadicity during the first year of life, we conducted a systematic and qualitative review of recent literature. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, we explored the scientific production of recent decades on triadic interactions up to 12 months of age. We initially screened 1943 items from which we obtained a final sample of 51 publications. Studies are usually conducted in laboratory settings, while ecological research is becoming increasingly common, especially in home settings. According to a thematic analysis of the data, we discussed the different perspectives on the origin and conceptualization of triadic interactions, and how they contribute to structuring and facilitating other developmental phenomena, such as the children's communicative gestures and uses of objects. Prior to the origin of intentional communication, adults facilitate early forms of triadicity based on fostering opportunities for infants' communication and engagement with both adults and materiality. However, there is a need for further research that explore the potential of early triadic interactions for parenting and early childhood education practises.

Embedding Play to Enrich Physical Therapy

Play is an active process by which an individual is intrinsically motivated to explore the self, the environment, and/or interactions with another person. For infants and toddlers, engaging in play is essential to support development across multiple domains. Infants and toddlers with or at risk of motor delays may demonstrate differences in play or challenges with engaging in play activities compared to typically developing peers. Pediatric physical therapists often use play as a modality to engage children in therapeutic assessment and interventions. Careful consideration of the design and use of physical therapy that embeds play is needed. Following a 3-day consensus conference and review of the literature, we propose physical therapy that embeds play should consider three components; the child, the environment, and the family. First, engage the child by respecting the child's behavioral state and following the child's lead during play, respect the child's autonomous play initiatives and engagements, use activities across developmental domains, and adapt to the individual child's needs. Second, structure the environment including the toy selection to support using independent movements as a means to engage in play. Allow the child to initiate and sustain play activities. Third, engage families in play by respecting individual family cultures related to play, while also providing information on the value of play as a tool for learning. Partner with families to design an individualized physical therapy routine that scaffolds or advances play using newly emerging motor skills.

Context-Specific Dyadic Attention Vulnerabilities During the First Year in Infants Later Developing Autism Spectrum Disorder

OBJECTIVE

Although some eye-tracking studies demonstrate atypical attention to faces by 6 months of age in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), behavioral studies in early infancy return largely negative results. We examined the effects of context and diagnosis on attention to faces during face-to-face live interactions in infants at high familial risk (HR) and low familial risk (LR) for ASD.

METHOD

Participants were 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old siblings of children with ASD who were later determined to have ASD (n = 21), other developmental challenges (HR-C; n = 74), or typical development (TD) (HR-TD; n = 32), and low-risk, typically developing controls (LR-TD; n = 49). Infants were administered the social orienting probes task, consisting of five conditions: dyadic bid, song, peek-a-boo, tickle, and toy play. Attention to an unfamiliar examiner's face was coded by blinded raters from video recordings.

RESULTS

At all ages, the ASD group spent less time looking at the examiner's face than the HR-C, HR-TD, and LR-TD groups during the Dyadic Bid and Tickle conditions (all p <.05), but not during the Song, Peek-a-Boo, or Toy Play conditions (all p >.23). Lower attention to faces during Dyadic Bid and Tickle conditions was significantly correlated with higher severity of autism symptoms at 18 months.

CONCLUSION

During the prodromal stages of the disorder, infants with ASD exhibited subtle impairments in attention to faces of interactive partners during interactions involving eye contact and child-directed speech (with and without physical contact), but not in contexts involving singing, familiar anticipatory games, or toy play. Considering the convergence with eye-tracking findings on limited attention to faces in infants later diagnosed with ASD, reduced attention to faces of interactive partners in specific contexts may constitute a promising candidate behavioral marker of ASD in infancy.

Joint engagement modulates object discrimination in toddlers: a pilot electrophysiological investigation

Joint engagement (JE) is a state in which two people attend to a common target. By supporting an infant's attention to the target, JE promotes encoding of information. This process has not been studied in toddlers despite the fact that language and social interaction develop rapidly in this period. We asked whether JE modulates object discrimination in typically developing toddlers. In a pilot evaluation of a novel, naturalistic paradigm, toddlers (n = 11) were introduced to toys by an examiner with or without JE. Toddlers then viewed images of the toys while high-density electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. Analysis focused on the differential neural response to objects presented in the two conditions. EEG components of interest included frontal positive component (Pb), negative component (Nc), and positive slow wave. Toddlers discriminated between conditions with a larger Pb peak amplitude to stimuli presented with JE and a larger Nc mean amplitude to the stimuli presented without JE, reflecting greater familiarity with the toys presented socially. Our findings suggest that JE supports object learning in toddlers, and supports the potential utility of this novel paradigm in both the assessment and the potential to detect impairment in social learning among toddlers.

Ostensive signals support learning from novel attention cues during infancy

Social attention cues (e.g., head turning, gaze direction) highlight which events young infants should attend to in a busy environment and, recently, have been shown to shape infants' likelihood of learning about objects and events. Although studies have documented which social cues guide attention and learning during early infancy, few have investigated how infants learn to learn from attention cues. Ostensive signals, such as a face addressing the infant, often precede social attention cues. Therefore, it is possible that infants can use ostensive signals to learn from other novel attention cues. In this training study, 8-month-olds were cued to the location of an event by a novel non-social attention cue (i.e., flashing square) that was preceded by an ostensive signal (i.e., a face addressing the infant). At test, infants predicted the appearance of specific multimodal events cued by the flashing squares, which were previously shown to guide attention to but not inform specific predictions about the multimodal events (Wu and Kirkham, 2010). Importantly, during the generalization phase, the attention cue continued to guide learning of these events in the absence of the ostensive signal. Subsequent experiments showed that learning was less successful when the ostensive signal was absent even if an interesting but non-ostensive social stimulus preceded the same cued events.

Children's recognition of emotions from vocal cues

Emotional cues contain important information about the intentions and feelings of others. Despite a wealth of research into children's understanding of facial signals of emotions, little research has investigated the developmental trajectory of interpreting affective cues in the voice. In this study, 48 children ranging between 5 and 10 years were tested using forced-choice tasks with non-verbal vocalizations and emotionally inflected speech expressing different positive, neutral and negative states. Children as young as 5 years were proficient in interpreting a range of emotional cues from vocal signals. Consistent with previous work, performance was found to improve with age. Furthermore, the two tasks, examining recognition of non-verbal vocalizations and emotionally inflected speech, respectively, were sensitive to individual differences, with high correspondence of performance across the tasks. From this demonstration of children's ability to recognize emotions from vocal stimuli, we also conclude that this auditory emotion recognition task is suitable for a wide age range of children, providing a novel, empirical way to investigate children's affect recognition skills.

Social cues at encoding affect memory in 4-month-old infants

Available evidence suggests that infants use adults' social cues for learning by the second half of the first year of life. However, little is known about the short-term or long-term effects of joint attention interactions on learning and memory in younger infants. In the present study, 4-month-old infants were familiarized with visually presented objects in either of two conditions that differed in the degree of joint attention (high vs. low). Brain activity in response to familiar and novel objects was assessed immediately after the familiarization phase (immediate recognition), and following a 1-week delay (delayed recognition). The latency of the Nc component differentiated between recognition of old versus new objects. Pb amplitude and latency were affected by joint attention in delayed recognition. Moreover, the frequency of infant gaze to the experimenter during familiarization differed between the two experimental groups and modulated the Pb response. Results show that joint attention affects the mechanisms of long-term retention in 4-month-old infants. We conclude that joint attention helps children at this young age to recognize the relevance of learned items.

Effects of joint attention on long-term memory in 9-month-old infants: an event-related potentials study

Joint attention develops during the first year of life but little is known about its effects on long-term memory. We investigated whether joint attention modulates long-term memory in 9-month-old infants. Infants were familiarized with visually presented objects in either of two conditions that differed in the degree of joint attention (high versus low). EEG indicators in response to old and novel objects were probed directly after the familiarization phase (immediate recognition), and following a 1-week delay (delayed recognition). In immediate recognition, the amplitude of positive slow-wave activity was modulated by joint attention. In the delayed recognition, the amplitude of the Pb component differentiated between high and low joint attention. In addition, the positive slow-wave amplitude during immediate and delayed recognition correlated with the frequency of infants' looks to the experimenter during familiarization. Under both high- and low-joint-attention conditions, the processing of unfamiliar objects was associated with an enhanced Nc component. Our results show that the degree of joint attention modulates EEG during immediate and delayed recognition. We conclude that joint attention affects long-term memory processing in 9-month-old infants by enhancing the relevance of attended items.

"Did you call me?" 5-month-old infants own name guides their attention

An infant's own name is a unique social cue. Infants are sensitive to their own name by 4 months of age, but whether they use their names as a social cue is unknown. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was measured as infants heard their own name or stranger's names and while looking at novel objects. Event related brain potentials (ERPs) in response to names revealed that infants differentiate their own name from stranger names from the first phoneme. The amplitude of the ERPs to objects indicated that infants attended more to objects after hearing their own names compared to another name. Thus, by 5 months of age infants not only detect their name, but also use it as a social cue to guide their attention to events and objects in the world.