The Role of Dyadic Coordination in Organizing Visual Attention in 5‐Month‐Old Infants

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Infants' Spatial Attention on the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA) Task

Research with Western samples has uncovered the rapid development of infants' visual attention. This study evaluated spatial attention in 6- to 9-month-old infants living in rural Malawi (N = 511;n Boys  = 255,n Yao  = 427) or suburban California, United States (N = 57,n Boys  = 29,n White  = 37) in 2018-2019. Using the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA) task, results showed that infants were faster and more accurate to fixate a target when a cue validly predicted the target location and were slower and less accurate when the cue was invalid. However, compared to US infants, Malawian infants took longer to fixate the target and were more accurate. These results both provide information about the development of spatial attention in an underrepresented population and demonstrate differences in spatial attention in infants with different lived experiences.

Finding order in chaos: influences of environmental complexity and predictability on development

Environments are dynamic and complex. Some children experience more predictable early life environments than others. Here, we consider how moment-by-moment complexity and predictability in our early environments influence development. New studies using wearable sensors are quantifying this environmental variability at a fine temporal resolution across hierarchically structured physical and social features. We identify three types of predictability: periodicities ('at X time intervals, Y happens'), stability ('given statex, statex+1 is known'), and contingency ('when I do X, Y happens'). We discuss how the temporal dynamics of environments may differ between individuals and the diverse developmental neural pathways through which this may influence outcomes, such as central nervous system (CNS) arousal and executive control. Finally, we discuss practical consequences and directions for future research.

Toddlers' prior social experience with speakers influences their word learning

Toddlers prefer to learn from familiar adults, particularly their caregivers, and perform better on word learning tasks when taught by caregivers than by strangers. However, it remains unclear why toddlers learn better from caregivers than from strangers. One possibility is that toddlers are more receptive to learning from individuals whom they have found to be engaging in previous interactions. The current study tested whether toddlers learn more from an unfamiliar adult who was previously engaging than from an unfamiliar adult who was previously unengaging. Toddlers (27-29 months, N = 40) were taught labels for novel objects by two different experimenters. Prior to word learning, toddlers watched pre-recorded videos of one experimenter utilizing engaging behaviors (i.e., using infant-directed speech, gestures, eye contact, and positive affect) and one experimenter utilizing unengaging behaviors (i.e., using adult-directed speech, no gestures, no eye contact, and neutral affect). Both experimenters were equally engaging during labeling. Word learning was then tested using a looking-while-listening paradigm. The results of linear mixed-effects model, cluster-based permutation, and growth curve analyses suggest heightened performance for words that were taught by the experimenter who was previously engaging. These results begin to reveal the kinds of social experiences that promote success in early word learning.

Building language learning: Relations between infant attention and social contingency in the first year of life

In Western societies, social contingency, or prompt and meaningful back-and-forth exchanges between infant and caregiver, is a powerful feature of the early language environment. Research suggests that infants with better attentional skills engage in more social contingency during interactions with adults and, in turn, social contingency supports infant attention. This reciprocity is theorized to build infant language skills as the adult capitalizes on and extends the infant's attention during socially contingent interactions. Using data from 104 infants and caregivers, this paper tests reciprocal relations between infant attention and social contingency at 6- and 12-months and the implications for infant vocabulary at 18-months. Infant attentional skills to social (women speaking) and nonsocial (objects dropping) events were assessed, and social contingency was examined during an 8-minute toy play interaction with a caregiver. Child receptive and expressive vocabulary was measured by caregiver-report. Both social and nonsocial attentional skills related to engagement in social contingency during caregiver-infant interaction, though only models that included social attention and social contingency predicted vocabulary. These findings provide empirical evidence for the proposed reciprocal relations between infant attention and social contingency as well as how they relate to later language.

Annual Research Review: 'There, the dance is - at the still point of the turning world' - dynamic systems perspectives on coregulation and dysregulation during early development

During development we transition from coregulation (where regulatory processes are shared between child and caregiver) to self-regulation. Most early coregulatory interactions aim to manage fluctuations in the infant's arousal and alertness; but over time, coregulatory processes become progressively elaborated to encompass other functions such as sociocommunicative development, attention and executive control. The fundamental aim of coregulation is to help maintain an optimal 'critical state' between hypo- and hyperactivity. Here, we present a dynamic framework for understanding child-caregiver coregulatory interactions in the context of psychopathology. Early coregulatory processes involve both passive entrainment, through which a child's state entrains to the caregiver's, and active contingent responsiveness, through which the caregiver changes their behaviour in response to behaviours from the child. Similar principles, of interactive but asymmetric contingency, drive joint attention and the maintenance of epistemic states as well as arousal/alertness, emotion regulation and sociocommunicative development. We describe three ways in which active child-caregiver regulation can develop atypically, in conditions such as Autism, ADHD, anxiety and depression. The most well-known of these is insufficient contingent responsiveness, leading to reduced synchrony, which has been shown across a range of modalities in different disorders, and which is the target of most current interventions. We also present evidence that excessive contingent responsiveness and excessive synchrony can develop in some circumstances. And we show that positive feedback interactions can develop, which are contingent but mutually amplificatory child-caregiver interactions that drive the child further from their critical state. We discuss implications of these findings for future intervention research, and directions for future work.

How does sensitivity influence early executive function? A critical review on hot and cool processes

There is compelling evidence that the quality of caregiver-child interactions during toddlerhood and the preschool years supports the development of executive function (EF) (Bernier et al., 2010; 2015; 2016; Fay-Stammbach et al., 2014; Geeraerts et al., 2021). Based on such findings, we make the case herein that sensitivity may be one of the most important dimensions of parenting contributing to early EF. In the present article, we will review empirical evidence, integrating findings from a wide range of scientific disciplines - cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and developmental psychopathology - and present theoretical ideas about how two contexts of sensitive caregiving - i.e. sensitivity to distress and non-distress cues - may be contributing differently to hot and cool EF development. Implications for future investigations on the environmental contributors of early EF, and its mechanisms, are discussed.

The Role of Talking Faces in Infant Language Learning: Mind the Gap between Screen-Based Settings and Real-Life Communicative Interactions

Over the last few decades, developmental (psycho) linguists have demonstrated that perceiving talking faces audio-visually is important for early language acquisition. Using mostly well-controlled and screen-based laboratory approaches, this line of research has shown that paying attention to talking faces is likely to be one of the powerful strategies infants use to learn their native(s) language(s). In this review, we combine evidence from these screen-based studies with another line of research that has studied how infants learn novel words and deploy their visual attention during naturalistic play. In our view, this is an important step toward developing an integrated account of how infants effectively extract audiovisual information from talkers' faces during early language learning. We identify three factors that have been understudied so far, despite the fact that they are likely to have an important impact on how infants deploy their attention (or not) toward talking faces during social interactions: social contingency, speaker characteristics, and task- dependencies. Last, we propose ideas to address these issues in future research, with the aim of reducing the existing knowledge gap between current experimental studies and the many ways infants can and do effectively rely upon the audiovisual information extracted from talking faces in their real-life language environment.

Proactive or reactive? Neural oscillatory insight into the leader-follower dynamics of early infant-caregiver interaction

We know that infants' ability to coordinate attention with others toward the end of the first year is fundamental to language acquisition and social cognition. Yet, we understand little about the neural and cognitive mechanisms driving infant attention in shared interaction: do infants play a proactive role in creating episodes of joint attention? Recording electroencephalography (EEG) from 12-mo-old infants while they engaged in table-top play with their caregiver, we examined the communicative behaviors and neural activity preceding and following infant- vs. adult-led joint attention. Infant-led episodes of joint attention appeared largely reactive: they were not associated with increased theta power, a neural marker of endogenously driven attention, and infants did not increase their ostensive signals before the initiation. Infants were, however, sensitive to whether their initiations were responded to. When caregivers joined their attentional focus, infants showed increased alpha suppression, a pattern of neural activity associated with predictive processing. Our results suggest that at 10 to 12 mo, infants are not routinely proactive in creating joint attention episodes yet. They do, however, anticipate behavioral contingency, a potentially foundational mechanism for the emergence of intentional communication.

Allostasis and metastasis: The yin and yang of childhood self-regulation

Most research has studied self-regulation by presenting experimenter-controlled test stimuli and measuring change between baseline and stimulus. In the real world, however, stressors do not flash on and off in a predetermined sequence, and there is no experimenter controlling things. Rather, the real world is continuous and stressful events can occur through self-sustaining interactive chain reactions. Self-regulation is an active process through which we adaptively select which aspects of the social environment we attend to from one moment to the next. Here, we describe this dynamic interactive process by contrasting two mechanisms that underpin it: the "yin" and "yang" of self-regulation. The first mechanism is allostasis, the dynamical principle underlying self-regulation, through which we compensate for change to maintain homeostasis. This involves upregulating in some situations and downregulating in others. The second mechanism is metastasis, the dynamical principle underling dysregulation. Through metastasis, small initial perturbations can become progressively amplified over time. We contrast these processes at the individual level (i.e., examining moment-to-moment change in one child, considered independently) and also at the inter-personal level (i.e., examining change across a dyad, such as a parent-child dyad). Finally, we discuss practical implications of this approach in improving the self-regulation of emotion and cognition, in typical development and psychopathology.

Implications of video chat use for young children's learning and social-emotional development: Learning words, taking turns, and fostering familial relationships

Parents of young children use video chat differently than other screen media, paralleling expert recommendations (e.g., American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media, 2016), which suggest that video chat, unlike other screen media, is acceptable for use by children under 18 months. Video chat is unique among screen media in that it permits contingent (time-sensitive and content-sensitive) social interactions. Contingent social interactions take place between a child and a partner (dyadic), with objects (triadic), and with multiple others (multi-party configurations), which critically underpin development in multiple domains. First, we review how contingent social interaction may underlie video chat's advantages in two domains: for learning (specifically learning new words) and for social-emotional development (specifically taking turns and fostering familial relationships). Second, we describe constraints on video chat use and how using chat with an active adult (co-viewing) may mitigate some of its limitations. Finally, we suggest future research directions that will clarify the potential advantages and impediments to the use of video chat by young children. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Learning Cognitive Biology > Social Development.

The development of visual attention in infancy: A cascade approach

Visual attention develops rapidly and significantly during the first postnatal years. At birth, infants have poor visual acuity, poor head and neck control, and as a result have little autonomy over where and how long they look. Across the first year, the neural systems that support alerting, orienting, and endogenous attention develop, allowing infants to more effectively focus their attention on information in the environment important for processing. However, visual attention is a system that develops in the context of the whole child, and fully understanding this development requires understanding how attentional systems interact and how these systems interact with other systems across wide domains. By adopting a cascades framework we can better position the development of visual attention in the context of the whole developing child. Specifically, development builds, with previous achievements setting the stage for current development, and current development having cascading consequences on future development. In addition, development reflects changes in multiple domains, and those domains influence each other across development. Finally, development reflects and produces changes in the input that the visual system receives; understanding the changing input is key to fully understand the development of visual attention. The development of visual attention is described in this context.

The memory benefits of two naps per day during infancy: A pilot investigation

In infancy, sleep occurs in multiple nap and overnight bouts that change developmentally in quantity and distribution. Though studies suggest that infant memory benefits from a single nap, no work has assessed the relative benefits of different naps (morning vs. afternoon), nor how multiple naps support memory across the day. We investigated the memory benefit of a morning nap, relative to morning wake, and the effect of these intervals on afternoon nap function in 9-month-olds (n = 15). Infants participated in two within-subjects conditions (separated by 1-2 weeks). In the Nap-Nap condition, infants took their morning and afternoon naps; in the Wake-Nap condition, infants were kept awake during morning naptime, but napped unrestricted in the afternoon. Before each nap/wake interval, infants completed an imitation memory task, with memory assessed again shortly after the nap/wake interval. In the Nap-Nap condition, infants showed memory retention across morning and afternoon naps. In contrast, infants tended to forget items learned across morning wake in the Wake-Nap condition. Moreover, morning wake was associated with a significant decline in post-nap retention of items learned in the afternoon. Furthermore, relations between nap slow-wave activity (SWA) and memory varied across naps, with SWA either not predicting (morning naps) or positively predicting (afternoon naps) memory change in the Nap-Nap condition, but negatively predicting afternoon memory change in the Wake-Nap condition. We conclude that two naps per day (rather than one) aids memory at 9 months, and that skipping the morning nap may moderate relations between afternoon nap physiology and memory.

Anticipation to Social and Nonsocial Dynamic Cues in Preschool-Age Children

The ability to learn from expectations is foundational to social and nonsocial learning in children. However, we know little about the brain basis of reward expectation in development. Here, 3- to 4-year-olds (N = 26) were shown a passive associative learning paradigm with dynamic stimuli. Anticipation for reward-related stimuli was measured via the stimulus preceding negativity (SPN). To our knowledge, this is the first study to measure an SPN in children younger than age 6. Our findings reveal distinct anticipatory neural signatures for social versus nonsocial stimuli, consistent with previous research in older children. This study suggests an SPN can be elicited in preschoolers and is larger for social than nonsocial stimuli.

Adjacent and Non-Adjacent Word Contexts Both Predict Age of Acquisition of English Words: A Distributional Corpus Analysis of Child-Directed Speech

Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child-directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We evaluate two sets of features: One set is generated from the distribution of words into frames defined by the two adjacent words. These features primarily encode syntactic aspects of word usage. The other set is generated from non-adjacent co-occurrences between words. These features encode complementary thematic aspects of word usage. Regression models using these distributional features to predict age of acquisition of 656 early-acquired English words indicate that both types of features improve predictions over simpler models based on frequency and appearance in salient or simple utterance contexts. Syntactic features were stronger predictors of children's production than comprehension, whereas thematic features were stronger predictors of comprehension. Overall, earlier acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for nouns and verbs, and by thematic content related to food and face-to-face play topics; later acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for pronouns and question words, and by content related to narratives and object play.