Associations Between Toddlers' Naturalistic Media Experience and Observed Learning from Screens

Using secondary analysis, researchers examined associations between two‐year‐olds' (N = 135) naturalistic use of interactive and noninteractive media with performance on a screen‐based learning task. Parents reported the number of minutes that children spent the previous day doing nine media‐related activities (e.g., watching television, playing handheld videogames). The object‐retrieval task required children to watch a hiding event on video and then search for the object on another screen or a real felt board. Results indicated that toddlers' naturalistic experience with interactive (but not noninteractive) media predicted their screen‐based learning in the laboratory. This was true regardless of whether children were tested using interactive or noninteractive video, suggesting that using interactive media (but not watching noninteractive video) is associated with children's learning from screen media generally.     

Toddlers Involve Their Caregiver to Help Another Person in Need

Three experiments with 18‐ to 35‐month‐old children (n = 169) studied toddler–caregiver interactions when being confronted with another person in need. In particular, we explored whether toddlers would request their caregiver to help a needy other when they are not able to help themselves. Children observed another person who needed help to accomplish a task, but were either not able to provide help as the object was out of reach (Experiment 1) or because an obstacle prevented children from interacting with the other person (Experiments 2, 2b). The experiments revealed the same developmental trend with 2.5‐year‐olds selectively involving their caregiver to help the needy other. The results are interpreted in terms of toddlers’ motivation to see others helped and with respect to their developing ability to actively involve others to regulate their emotions.     

Integration of Thought and Action: Arm Weights Facilitate Search Accuracy in 24‐Month‐Old Children

Search errors are common in cognitive tasks with infants and toddlers, and these errors reveal important insights to the development of competence and performance. Rivière and Lécuyer (2008, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 100, 1) demonstrated that 29‐month‐olds typically make an error during a search task involving invisible displacement. However, performance improves significantly when children wear weighted wrist bands while doing the task. To investigate this phenomenon further, we tested 24‐month‐old children in an identical search task (N = 35). Half the children wore weighted wrist bands, and the rest were in a no‐weight condition. To test how far this phenomenon generalizes, we also tested the same children in a second search task where they needed to find a ball that had rolled behind one of four doors. The results showed that children in the no‐weight condition replicated previous findings of poor performance on both search tasks. Unlike 29‐month‐olds, the 24‐month‐olds in the weighted condition did not immediately show improvement on the search tasks. However, after an initial search attempt, children wearing weights performed significantly better than chance. The findings shed new light on the interplay between thought and action.     

To Cue or Not to Cue: Toddlers’ Use of Beacons and Associative Cues in Object‐displacement Tasks

Two experiments examined 24‐ and 30‐month‐olds' use of different forms of landmark information in an object‐displacement task involving a car rolling down a ramp whose trajectory was occluded by a screen containing doors. A pompom attached to the car, visible through a transparent window running across the screen, served as a cue for the car's location and functioned either as a beacon cue, directly guiding search to a given location, or an associative cue, indirectly marking target location. Interestingly, one way in which the cue information was modified from a beacon to an associative cue was in terms of the structure of the search apparatus, and not necessarily the cue information itself. Consistent with previous literature, 24‐month‐olds' search was significantly influenced by the shift from beacon to associative cue information, whereas 30‐month‐olds, although affected by the shift from one to the other, were less affected by this variation. These findings suggest that the cue drives attention to specific locations in space, with search behavior being more accurate when the cue directly marks the hiding location (i.e., beacon) than when the cue indirectly marks it (i.e., associative cue).     

Parental Linguistic Input and Its Relation to Toddlers’ Visual Attention in Joint Object Play: A Comparison Between Children with Normal Hearing and Children With Hearing Loss

Parent–child interactions are multimodal, often involving coordinated exchanges of visual and auditory information between the two partners. The current work focuses on the effect of children's hearing loss on parent–child interactions when parents and their toddlers jointly played with a set of toy objects. We compared the linguistic input received by toddlers with hearing loss (HL) and their chronological age‐matched (CA) and hearing age‐matched (HA) normal‐hearing peers. Moreover, we used head‐mounted eye trackers to examine how different parental linguistic input affected children's visual attention on objects when parents either led or followed children's attention during joint object play. Overall, parents of children with HL provided comparable amount of linguistic input as parents of the two normal‐hearing groups. However, the types of linguistic input produced by parents of children with HL were similar to the CA group in some ways and similar to the HA group in other ways. Interestingly, the effects of different types of linguistic input on extending the attention of children with HL qualitatively resembled the patterns seen in the CA group, even though the effects were less pronounced in the HL group. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the reciprocal, dynamic, and multi‐factored nature of parent–child interactions.     

Attention to Threat as a Predictor of Shyness in the Context of Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior

The duration of children's attention to putative threat has been documented as a consistent predictor of later anxiety in inhibited children across childhood (Fox, New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 127, 2010, 33; Pérez‐Edgar & Fox, Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 14, 2005, 681). However, attention to threat has not been broadly examined within existing behavioral contexts and has seldom been studied in very early childhood. Whereas toddlers with high levels of internalizing behavior may view fear‐inducing stimuli as a threat, toddlers with high levels of externalizing behavior may demonstrate attention out of interest or sensation seeking. Thus, attention to threat was expected to predict increased toddler shyness in the context of either high internalizing problems or low externalizing behavior. We examined 117 twenty‐four‐month‐old toddlers to determine whether attention to threat interacted with internalizing and externalizing behavior at 24 months of age to predict toddler shyness one year later. Results indicated that attention to threat predicted toddlers' lower shyness at 36 months when toddlers’ externalizing behavior at age 24 months were high, but there was no significant interaction between toddlers’ internalizing behavior and their attention to threat in predicting later shyness. These results expand our understanding of the contexts in which attention to threat in early childhood is a viable predictor of later shyness.     

An Eye Tracking Investigation of Color–Location Binding in Infants' Visual Short‐Term Memory

Two experiments examined 8‐ and 10‐month‐old infants' (N = 71) binding of object identity (color) and location information in visual short‐term memory (VSTM) using a one‐shot change detection task. Building on previous work using the simultaneous streams change detection task, we confirmed that 8‐ and 10‐month‐old infants are sensitive to changes in binding between identity and location in VSTM. Further, we demonstrated that infants recognize specifically what changed in these events. Thus, infants' VSTM for binding is robust and can be observed in different procedures and with different stimuli.     

Disappearing Décalage: Object Search in Light and Dark at 6 Months

Infants search for an object hidden by an occluder in the light months later than one hidden by darkness. One explanation attributes this décalage to easier action demands in darkness versus occlusion, whereas another attributes it to easier representation demands in darkness versus occlusion. However, search tasks typically confound these two types of demands. This article presents a search task that unconfounds them to better address these two explanations of the “dark advantage.” Objects were hidden by submersion in liquid instead of occlusion with a screen, allowing infants to search with equally simple actions in light versus dark. In Experiment 1, 6‐month‐olds unexpectedly showed a dark disadvantage by discriminating when an object was hidden in the light but not the dark. Experiment 2 addressed the possibility that representation demands were higher in the dark than the light and showed that infants’ search in the dark increased to match that in the light, but not exceed it. Six‐month‐olds can thus search for a hidden object both when action demands are simplified and when a noncohesive substance rather than a cohesive occluder hides the object, supporting aspects of both action‐demand and representation‐demand explanations of décalage in search behavior.     

Exploring Parents' Experiences and Reactions to Adolescents' Hyperactivity,Impulsivity, and Attention Problems

Adolescents' hyperactivity, impulsivity, and attention problems (HIA) have been shown to make parents feel powerless. In this study, the authors examined whether these feelings were dependent on parents' experiences with their older children. Two models that offer different predictions of how parents make use of their earlier experiences when raising their later‐born children were explored: the learning‐from‐experience model and the spillover model. The authors used reports from 372 parents with 1 child (M_age = 11.92) and 198 parents with 2 children (M_age = 11.89 and 14.35) from a small town in a European country. The results did not support a learning‐from‐experience process. Instead, consistent with a spillover process, parents felt particularly powerless about their younger children with HIA if they also felt powerless about their older children. This study suggests that parents' experiences of raising their older children are important for their reactions to HIA in their younger children     

Sequences of toddler negative emotion and parent–toddler verbal communication during a waking day

Although the second year of life is characterized by dramatic changes in expressive language and by increases in negative emotion expression, verbal communication and emotional communication are often studied separately. With a sample of twenty‐five one‐year‐olds (12–23 months), we used Language Environment Analysis (LENA; Xu, Yapanel, & Gray, 2009, Reliability of the LENA? language environment analysis system in young children’s natural home environment. LENA Foundation) to audio‐record and quantify parent–toddler communication, including toddlers’ vocal negative emotion expressions, across a full waking day. Using a multilevel extension of lag‐sequential analysis, we investigated whether parents are differentially responsive to toddlers’ negative emotion expressions compared to their verbal or preverbal vocalizations, and we examined the effects of parents’ verbal responses on toddlers’ subsequent communicative behavior. Toddlers’ negative emotions were less likely than their vocalizations to be followed by parent speech. However, when negative emotions were followed by parent speech, toddlers were most likely to vocalize next. Post hoc analyses suggest that older toddlers and toddlers with higher language abilities were more likely to shift from negative emotion to verbal or preverbal vocalization following parent response. Implications of the results for understanding the parent–toddler communication processes that support both emotional development and verbal development are discussed.     

Object Locations,Identity and Absent Reference Understanding at 12 Months

Spatial and contextual information plays an organizing role in many cognitive processes including object individuation and memory retrieval. Recently, attention has been drawn to the fact that changes in an object's location negatively affect infants' learning in different domains. One example is that prestudy exposure to a target object in a nontest location disrupts infants' ability to locate that object when it is hidden in a test room. In the current study, we investigate the possibility that infants' difficulty finding the object is the result of confusion about the identity of the target object. In the current research, infants were familiarized with an object in one room and tested in the other. Infants who were shown a characteristic identifying feature on the object in both locations and who were thus able to track the object identity could later locate the absent referent. In contrast, when infants' attention was drawn to different features on the object in the two locations or to the object itself via pointing, infants were unable to find the object.     

Poor Mothers and Habits of Hiding: Participatory Methods in Poverty Research

Poor mothers have long‐standing habits of hiding their lives in response to punitive authorities and stigma. We identify practices of hiding daily life, and we describe participatory research approaches for and ethical concerns in learning more about poor women's critical insights and survival strategies.     

“Help Yourself!” What Can Toddlers' Helping Failures Tell Us About the Development of Prosocial Behavior?

Prosocial behavior emerges in the second year of life, yet it is typical for children in this period not to share, comfort, or help. We compared toddlers (18, 30 months) who helped with those who did not help on two tasks (instrumental helping; empathic helping). More than half of children failed to help on one or both tasks. Nonhelpers engaged in more hypothesis testing on the instrumental helping task, but more security‐seeking, wariness, and playing on the empathic helping task. Across tasks, children who tended to engage in nonhelping behaviors associated with negative emotional arousal also tended to seek comfort from a parent. In contrast, children who tended to play instead of helping were less likely to exhibit negative emotional arousal or hypothesis testing, suggesting a focus on their own interests. Parents of 18‐month‐old nonhelpers on the instrumental task were less engaged in socializing prosocial behavior in their toddlers than were the parents of helpers. On the empathic helping task, 18‐month‐old nonhelpers had less mature self‐other understanding than did helpers. By examining how the predominant reasons for failing to help vary with age and task, we gain a fuller perspective on the factors involved in the early development of prosocial behavior.     

Do As I Say and Not As I Think: Parent Socialisation of Lie‐Telling Behaviour

This study explored parent (N = 146) perspectives about situations in which they think it is acceptable to lie, how this corresponds to how they socialise their children about lie‐telling and their children's actual behaviour. Results indicated the methods parents report using to teach their children about the acceptability of lie‐telling are consistent with what they report teaching their children about lie‐telling overall. Also, the frequency of lies that children told (N = 88) to protect themselves from psychological distress or conflict differed between those who were taught that lying is sometimes acceptable versus those taught it is never acceptable.     

The Development of Object Construction From Infancy Through Toddlerhood

Early in development, children explore and combine objects in increasingly complex ways. One manual skill, object construction, represents a major shift in how objects are explored relative to other objects. Despite recent connections with cognitive functioning such as spatial skills, the development of object construction ability has rarely been studied and its trajectory has not been adequately described. The purpose of this study was to describe the development of three types of object construction (stacking, nesting, and affixing) across 5 monthly infant visits and 7 monthly toddler visits using a longitudinal design and a large sample size. Infants (10–14 months, n = 131) and toddlers drawn from the infant sample (18–24 months, n = 65) were given sets of age‐appropriate toys each of which elicited at least one type of constructive play. We described success at different construction tasks and identified trends for construction skill for infant and toddler development using multilevel modeling. We found that each of the three construction actions developed in unique ways across the 10‐ to 24‐month period. Infant construction skill predicted the development of toddler skill, but toddler construction skill diverged from infant trajectories. We discuss the role of combination strategies in the development of object construction skill and how object construction could be related to other domains of development.     

Early Word Recognition in Sentence Context: French and English 24‐Month‐Olds' Sensitivity to Sentence‐Medial Mispronunciations and Assimilations

Recent work has shown that young children can use fine phonetic detail during the recognition of isolated and sentence‐final words from early in lexical development. The present study investigates 24‐month‐olds' word recognition in sentence‐medial position in two experiments using an Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm. In Experiment 1, French toddlers detect word‐final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., bu z [by z ] for bu s [by s ] “bus”), and they compensate for native voicing assimilations (e.g., bu z d evant toi [bu zd ?vɑ?twa] “bus in front of you”) in the middle of sentences. Similarly, English toddlers detect word‐final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., shee b for shee p ) in Experiment 2, but they do not compensate for illicit voicing assimilations (e.g., shee b th ere). Thus, French and English 24‐month‐olds can take into account fine phonetic detail even if words are presented in the middle of sentences, and French toddlers show language‐specific compensation abilities for pronunciation variation caused by native voicing assimilation.     

Limits on Infants' Ability to Dynamically Update Object Representations

Like adults, infants use working memory to represent occluded objects and can update these memory representations to reflect changes to a scene that unfold over time. Here we tested the limits of infants' ability to update object representations in working memory. Eleven‐month‐old infants participated in a modified foraging task in which they saw 2 quantities of crackers sequentially hidden in buckets and then were allowed to choose between them. We manipulated the working memory demands of the task by either hiding crackers in direct succession (i.e., infants saw all of the crackers hidden in the first location, then saw all of the crackers hidden in the second location), or hiding them in alternation (i.e., infants saw some crackers hidden in the first location, then saw some crackers hidden in the second location, then saw more crackers hidden in the first location). Across 6 experiments we found that infants successfully updated their representations of the hidden arrays when crackers were presented in succession. However, when crackers were hidden in alternation and infants had to reupdate an array that was no longer in the current focus of attention, infants showed a striking pattern of failure. These results suggest that, for infants as well as for adults, the flexibility of working memory is subject to processing constraints.     

Cotton‐Top Tamarins' (Saguinus oedipus) Expectations About Occluded Objects: A Dissociation Between Looking and Reaching Tasks

Recent work with human infants and toddlers suggests a dissociation between performance on looking and reaching tasks. Specifically, infants appear to generate accurate representations of occluded objects and their actions when tested in expectancy violation looking tasks but often fail to use this information when reaching for occluded objects. We explore a similar dissociation in cotton‐top tamarin monkeys (Saguinus oedipus). We presented adult tamarins with an event in which a piece of food rolled behind an occluder and into a solid barrier. In Experiment 1, subjects were required to retrieve the hidden food using the location of the solid barrier. Like human toddlers, adult tamarins failed to take into account solidity information when reaching for an invisibly displaced object. In Experiments 2 and 3, we presented subjects with expectancy violation looking versions of the same solidity problem using an identical apparatus and setup. We presented subjects with an event in which a piece of food appeared to roll unexpectedly through a solid barrier or stopped at the appropriate spot. Although tamarins failed to locate the food in Experiment 1, the same subjects successfully detected violations of solidity in these 2 looking studies. This performance dissociation is discussed in light of similar dissociations in human toddlers and other primate species.     

Nineteen‐Month‐Olds' Understanding of the Conventionality of Object Labels Versus Desires

We assessed 19‐month‐olds' appreciation of the conventional nature of object labels versus desires. Infants played a finding game with an experimenter who stated her intention to find the referent of a novel word (word group), to find an object she wanted (desire group), or simply to look in a box (control group). A 2nd experimenter then administered a comprehension task to assess infants' tendency to extend information to a 2nd person who was not present at the time of learning. Results indicate that infants chose the target object when the 2nd experimenter asked for the referent of the novel label but not when she requested the referent of her desire. These findings demonstrate that 19‐month‐olds understand that words are conventional, but desires are not.     

When to Make the Sensory Social: Registering in Face‐to‐Face Openings

This article analyzes naturally occurring video‐recorded openings during which participants make the sensory social through the action of registering—calling joint attention to a selected, publicly perceivable referent so others shift their sensory attention to it. It examines sequence‐initial actions that register referents for which a participant is regarded as responsible. Findings demonstrate a systematic preference organization which observably guides when and how people initiate registering sequences sensitive to ownership of, and displayed stance toward, the target referent. Analysis shows how registering an owned referent achieves intersubjectivity and puts involved participants' face, affiliation, and social relationship on the line. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/rNL70vawG3o