Oh, Behave!: PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, XXth International Conference on Infant Studies New Orleans, LA, US May 2016

Role differentiated bimanual manipulation during a lab-based free play task

Infants spend a significant portion of their day engaging in play and accumulate immense amounts of object interactions. As infants develop, they perform increasingly complex bimanual actions, such as role differentiated bimanual manipulation (RDBM), where each hand serves a distinct role. RDBM has been well documented in structured lab settings, but these studies restrict the types of toys and postures in which infants can engage. Therefore, previous studies are limited in that they do not simulate everyday infant object interactions. Infants (39 13- and 39 24-month-olds) engaged in a 20-minute lab-based free play task designed to mimic everyday object interactions in order to assess the prevalence of RDBM and to understand the influence of posture, toy size, and toy weight on RDBM. Although both age groups frequently engaged in object interaction, RDBM did not occur as often in the lab-based free play task as found previously in structured settings. Whereas infants engaged in RDBM with toys of various sizes and weights, they favored lightweight toys and preferred to sit while engaging in RDBM. The 13-month-old infants preferred small toys while the 24-month-olds more often incorporated medium and large toys in their interactions. Examining RDBM using a lab-based free play task furthers our understanding of how complex bimanual behaviors emerge in a naturalistic setting where infants can adopt a wide range of postures and interact with a variety of toys.

BabyOSCAR: Support for measuring underlying coordination of spontaneous movements in infancy

This commentary is on the original articles by Maziero Barbosa et al., Sukal‐Moulton et al., and Peyton et al. on pages 1502–1510, 1511–1520, and 1521–1528 of this issue.

The mountain stream of infant development

Development is complex. It encompasses interacting domains, at multiple levels, across nested time scales. Embracing the complexity of development-while addressing the challenges inherent to studying infants-requires researchers to make tough decisions about what to study, why, how, where, and when. My own view is inspired by a developmental systems approach, and echoed in Esther Thelen's (2005) mountain stream metaphor. Like a river that carves its course, the active infant navigates the social and physical environment and generates rich inputs that propel learning and development. Drawing from my experiences, I offer some recommendations to guide research on infants. I encourage researchers to embrace discovery science; to observe infants in ecologically valid settings; to recognize the active and adaptive nature of infant behavior; to break down silos and consider the nonobvious; and to adopt full transparency in all aspects of research. I draw on cascading influences in infant play, language, and motor domains to illustrate the value of a bottom-up, cross-domain, collaborative approach.

Show your work: Tools for open developmental science

Since grade school, students of many subjects have learned to "show their work" in order to receive full credit for assignments. Many of the reasons for students to show their work extend to the conduct of scientific research. And yet multiple barriers make it challenging to share and show the products of scientific work beyond published findings. This chapter discusses some of these barriers and how web-based data repositories help overcome them. The focus is on Databrary.org, a data library specialized for storing and sharing video data with a restricted community of institutionally approved investigators. Databrary was designed by and for developmental researchers, and so its features and policies reflect many of the specific challenges faced by this community, especially those associated with sharing video and related identifiable data. The chapter argues that developmental science poses some of the most interesting, challenging, and important questions in all of science, and that by openly sharing much more of the products and processes of our work, developmental scientists can accelerate discovery while making our scholarship much more robust and reproducible.

Daylong Mobile Audio Recordings Reveal Multitimescale Dynamics in Infants' Vocal Productions and Auditory Experiences

The sounds of human infancy-baby babbling, adult talking, lullaby singing, and more-fluctuate over time. Infant-friendly wearable audio recorders can now capture very large quantities of these sounds throughout infants' everyday lives at home. Here, we review recent discoveries about how infants' soundscapes are organized over the course of a day based on analyses designed to detect patterns at multiple timescales. Analyses of infants' day-long audio have revealed that everyday vocalizations are clustered hierarchically in time, vocal explorations are consistent with foraging dynamics, and musical tunes are distributed such that some are much more available than others. This approach focusing on the multi-scale distributions of sounds heard and produced by infants provides new, fundamental insights on human communication development from a complex systems perspective.

Parent-Infant Interaction Tasks Adapted for Remote Testing: Strengths, Challenges, and Recommendations

The closure of in-person laboratories and decreased safety of face-to-face interactions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic jeopardized the ability of many developmental researchers to continue data collection during this time. Disruptions in data collection are particularly damaging to longitudinal studies, in which the testing of different age groups occurs on a continuous basis, and data loss at one time point can have cascading effects across subsequent time points and threaten the viability of the study. In an effort to continue collecting data for a longitudinal study on emotion development started in-person pre-pandemic, we adapted two parent-infant interaction tasks (free-play task and toy removal task) for a remote testing framework. Our procedure for pivoting these tasks to a supervised, remote online testing framework is outlined and the associated strengths and challenges of testing in this format (e.g., feasibility and implementation, testing environment and task setup validity, and accessibility, recruitment, and diversity) are critically evaluated. Considerations for applying this framework to other behavioral tasks are discussed and recommendations are provided.

Quantifying Everyday Ecologies: Principles for Manual Annotation of Many Hours of Infants' Lives

Everyday experiences are the experiences available to shape developmental change. Remarkable advances in devices used to record infants' and toddlers' everyday experiences, as well as in repositories to aggregate and share such recordings across teams of theorists, have yielded a potential gold mine of insights to spur next-generation theories of experience-dependent change. Making full use of these advances, however, currently requires manual annotation. Manually annotating many hours of everyday life is a dedicated pursuit requiring significant time and resources, and in many domains is an endeavor currently lacking foundational facts to guide potentially consequential implementation decisions. These realities make manual annotation a frequent barrier to discoveries, as theorists instead opt for narrower scoped activities. Here, we provide theorists with a framework for manually annotating many hours of everyday life designed to reduce both theoretical and practical overwhelm. We share insights based on our team's recent adventures in the previously uncharted territory of everyday music. We identify principles, and share implementation examples and tools, to help theorists achieve scalable solutions to challenges that are especially fierce when annotating extended timescales. These principles for quantifying everyday ecologies will help theorists collectively maximize return on investment in databases of everyday recordings and will enable a broad community of scholars—across institutions, skillsets, experiences, and working environments—to make discoveries about the experiences upon which development may depend.

(Hyper)active Data Curation: A Video Case Study from Behavioral Science

Video data are uniquely suited for research reuse and for documenting research methods and findings. However, curation of video data is a serious hurdle for researchers in the social and behavioral sciences, where behavioral video data are obtained session by session and data sharing is not the norm. To eliminate the onerous burden of post hoc curation at the time of publication (or later), we describe best practices in active data curation-where data are curated and uploaded immediately after each data collection to allow instantaneous sharing with one button press at any time. Indeed, we recommend that researchers adopt "hyperactive" data curation where they openly share every step of their research process. The necessary infrastructure and tools are provided by Databrary-a secure, web-based data library designed for active curation and sharing of personally identifiable video data and associated metadata. We provide a case study of hyperactive curation of video data from the Play and Learning Across a Year (PLAY) project, where dozens of researchers developed a common protocol to collect, annotate, and actively curate video data of infants and mothers during natural activity in their homes at research sites across North America. PLAY relies on scalable standardized workflows to facilitate collaborative research, assure data quality, and prepare the corpus for sharing and reuse throughout the entire research process.