How to build up big team science: a practical guide for large-scale collaborations.

The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of big team science (BTS), endeavours where a comparatively large number of researchers pool their intellectual and/or material resources in pursuit of a common goal. Despite this burgeoning interest, there exists little guidance on how to create, manage and participate in these collaborations. In this paper, we integrate insights from a multi-disciplinary set of BTS initiatives to provide a how-to guide for BTS. We first discuss initial considerations for launching a BTS project, such as building the team, identifying leadership, governance, tools and open science approaches. We then turn to issues related to running and completing a BTS project, such as study design, ethical approvals and issues related to data collection, management and analysis. Finally, we address topics that present special challenges for BTS, including authorship decisions, collaborative writing and team decision-making.

The road to conventional tool use: Developmental changes in children's material engagement with artifacts in nursery school.

The development of tool use in early childhood is a topic of continuing interest in developmental psychology. However, the lack of studies in ecological settings results in many unknowns about how children come to use artifacts according to their cultural function. We report a longitudinal study with 17 sociodemographically diverse children (8 female) attending a nursery school in Madrid (Spain) and their two adult female teachers. Using mixed-effects models and Granger causality analysis, we measured changes in the frequency and duration of children's object uses between 7 and 17 months of age and in the directional influences among pairs of behaviors performed by teachers and children. Results show a clear shift in how children use artifacts. As early as 12 months of age, the frequency of conventional uses outweighs that of all other types of object use. In addition, object uses become shorter in duration with age, irrespective of their type. Moreover, certain teachers' nonlinguistic communicative strategies (e.g., demonstrations of canonical use and placing gestures) significantly influence and promote children's conventional tool use. Findings shed light on how children become increasingly proficient in conventional tool use through interactions with artifacts and others in nursery school.

Intentional Understanding Through Action Coordination in Early Triadic Interactions.

The ability to understand the behaviour of other people in intentional terms has been traditionally explained by resorting to inferential mechanisms that would allow individuals to access the internal mental states of others. In recent years, the second-person perspective has established itself as a theoretical alternative to traditional models. It argues that intentional understanding is an embodied, natural, and immediate process that occurs in situations such as face-to-face early dyadic interactions between adults and infants. In this article, we argue that the way in which the second-person perspective regards body and object is problematic. Based on psychological evidence that demonstrates the constitutive role of the body and objects for cognitive development, we propose the foundations of an ecological-enactive, semiotic and pragmatic model of intentional understanding. We argue that intentional understanding should be conceived as the skilful coordination of behaviours that subjects come to enact in interactive settings, following the dynamics of bodily and material practices that have acquired normative force over time.

What's an early triadic interaction made of? A methodological proposal to study the musical dynamics of interaction.

Classical theories of intersubjectivity hold that the first interactions in which children participate are dyadic (adult-baby). However, thanks to the material shift that is taking place in the cognitive sciences, an increasing number of authors began to recognise the constitutive role that materiality has for cognition, from the very beginning of life. Interactions do not occur in a vacuum, but within a meaning-loaded material world that adults actively seek to bring to children. While in the field of dyadic interactions studies on communicative musicality have shown how interactive exchanges are structured and how that structure unfolds over time, little is known yet about the internal structure of early triadic interactions. In this paper, we propose a longitudinal, mixed and multilevel methodological framework aimed at describing the dynamics of the musical organisation of early triadic interactions between adults, babies and things, and its development over different timescales. We conclude that if researchers want to fully understand early triadic interactions and their musical structuring, further studies that take into account the cognitive relevance of things and the dynamics of our interactions with and through materiality are needed.

The development of categorisation and conceptual thinking in early childhood: methods and limitations.

We present a systematic and qualitative review of academic literature on early conceptual development (0-24 months of age), with an emphasis on methodological aspects. The final sample of our review included 281 studies reported in 115 articles. The main aims of the article were four: first, to organise studies into sets according to methodological similarities and differences; second, to elaborate on the methodological procedures that characterise each set; third, to circumscribe the empirical indicators that different sets of studies consider as proof of the existence of concepts in early childhood; last, to identify methodological limitations and to propose possible ways to overcome them. We grouped the studies into five sets: preference and habituation experiments, category extension tasks, object sorting tasks, sequential touching tasks and object examination tasks. In the "Results" section, we review the core features of each set of studies. In the "Discussion" and "Conclusions" sections, we describe, for one thing, the most relevant methodological shortcomings. We end by arguing that a situated, semiotic and pragmatic perspective that emphasises the importance of ecological validity could open up new avenues of research to better understand the development of concepts in early childhood.

Musical dynamics in early triadic interactions: a case study.

Research of the last 30 years showed the importance of music for psychological development. Communicative musicality studies described musical organisations in dyadic interactions (adult-baby). However, other perspectives proposed that, from the beginning of life, there are early triadic interactions (adult-object-baby) that should also be analysed. Following previous research, we hypothesised that early triadic interactions have a structured musical organisation. We recorded a 2-month-old child interacting with his mother and an object in their home and performed a microgenetic quantitative-qualitative analysis. Given the child's age, we focused on musical characteristics of the mother's actions. To our knowledge, this is the first study to combine data processing provided by ELAN, Finale, and Matlab-MIRtoolbox. Our analysis shows that the child participates in triadic interactions in which the mother communicates about and through the maraca using musical resources in increasingly complex ways. Musical structuring happens at the intersegment, intrasequence, and intersequence levels, and involves different musical parameters. We suggest musical organisation in early triadic interactions follows a holographic structure in which each piece carries information about dynamic processes of different timescales. Results highlight the importance of considering objects and their uses to better understand early communicative musicality.

The development of categorisation and conceptual thinking in early childhood: methods and limitations

Abstract We present a systematic and qualitative review of academic literature on early conceptual development (0-24 months of age), with an emphasis on methodological aspects. The final sample of our review included 281 studies reported in 115 articles. The main aims of the article were four: first, to organise studies into sets according to methodological similarities and differences; second, to elaborate on the methodological procedures that characterise each set; third, to circumscribe the empirical indicators that different sets of studies consider as proof of the existence of concepts in early childhood; last, to identify methodological limitations and to propose possible ways to overcome them. We grouped the studies into five sets: preference and habituation experiments , category extension tasks , object sorting tasks , sequential touching tasks and object examination tasks . In the "Results" section, we review the core features of each set of studies. In the "Discussion" and "Conclusions" sections, we describe, for one thing, the most relevant methodological shortcomings. We end by arguing that a situated, semiotic and pragmatic perspective that emphasises the importance of ecological validity could open up new avenues of research to better understand the development of concepts in early childhood.

Imaginación, creatividad y fantasía en Lev S. Vygotski: una aproximación a su enfoque sociocultural

Este trabajo persigue dos objetivos; en primer lugar, exponer sucintamente algunas de las características de las categorías conceptuales que constituyen el núcleo duro de los enfoques socioculturales, tanto en su formulación vygotskiana (Teoría Histórico-Cultural), como en aquellas postvygotskianas. Ello permitirá sentar bases conceptuales desde las cuales encarar el segundo objetivo, a saber, analizar el texto Imaginación y creatividad en el adolescente [Pedologija podrostka (Pedagogía del Adolescente), 1931] de Lev S. Vygotski. Dicho texto resulta un caso de análisis útil tanto para ilustrar el abordaje sociocultural del autor en relación con la creatividad y su vinculación con otras funciones psicológicas al interior del desarrollo sociogenético del individuo, como su poder de creación de consciencia y control autorregulatorio.las organizaciones y la sociedad en reducir las desigualdades en el lugar de trabajo y apoyar mejores acciones preventivas.

This article has two aims. First, to expose briefly some characteristics of the key conceptual categories of sociocultural approaches, both in its Vygotskian (Historical-Cultural Theory) and post-Vygotskian interpretations. This will lay the conceptual foundations needed to address the second aim, that is, to analyse the text Imagination and Creativity in the Adolescent [Pedologija podrostka (Pedagogy of the Adolescent), 1931] by Lev S. Vygotski. This text makes up a useful case to explain the author's sociocultural approach about creativity and its relationship with other psychological functions within the sociogenetic development of subjects, as well as its power of creation of consciousness and autoregulatory control.

Development of Metaphorical Thought before Language: the Pragmatic Construction of Metaphors in Action.

In this article, we set out, first, a general overview of metaphor and metaphorical thought research within cognitive psychology and developmental psychology. We claim that, although research efforts broadened perspectives that considered metaphors to be ornaments of poetic language, certain predominance of a linguistic point of view within investigations led to relatively little attention paid to (i) non-verbal and non-written metaphorical instantiations, and (ii) the pre-linguistic and cultural origins of metaphorical thought. Next, we attempt to delve into, and model, the ontogenetic origins of metaphor, taking into consideration social and cultural elements. To that end, we consider the Vygotskian perspective and contemporary research from the pragmatics of the object. We propose that metaphorical thought is an emerging result of a complex web of dynamic relationships between pre-linguistic and socioculturally regulated semiotic systems. The analysis undertaken shows the need for a research programme with a developmental orientation that considers metaphor to be a product of the intertwining between the individual and social dimensions of cognitive development. We suggest this programme should find its roots in the analysis of the semiotic skills that precede the acquisition of metaphorical language.