Racial categorization and intergroup perception in preschool children: A focus on group membership and group size in the French context.

In the current study, we explored how context influences intergroup perception in 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 242; Mage = 55.5 months, SD = 9.94) in France. We examined the impact of participants' group membership (belonging to a high- vs. low-social-status group) and their group size on the development of racial categorization and the perception of cultural distance. Children completed two tasks using photographs depicting children from the three most represented racial groups in France: Caucasians, Black Africans, and North Africans. In the first task, the free categorization task, they were asked to group photographs of children they thought belonged together. Results revealed that as children grew older, they increasingly grouped children based on their race. In addition, high-social-status (nonmarginalized) children categorized more based on race than low-social-status children. In a second task, children were requested to rate the same photographs on a 5-point Likert scale for perceived cultural distance in three criteria: music, eating habits, and language. Results showed that regardless of their own group membership, children perceived photos representing children of color (North and Black Africans) as culturally more distant than White children on all criteria. However, this bias was not observed in schools where groups have equal numerical status, suggesting a positive impact of environments where groups are numerically equal.

Systematic review shows the benefits of involving the fathers of preterm infants in early interventions in neonatal intensive care units.

AIM: This review identifies interventions involving the fathers of preterm infants that have been tested in neonatal intensive care units (NICU). It examines their effects on the fathers and infants and highlights any differences between fathers and mothers who took part in the same interventions. METHODS: A systematic search was performed in English from 1995 to 1 September 2020, using the CINAHL, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Embase, PubMed and PsycINFO databases. We examined 14 peer-reviewed studies that investigated NICU interventions involving 478 fathers, whose 511 infants were born before 37 weeks of gestation. These included empirical studies with clinical outcomes. RESULTS: Studies on fathers' interventions in NICUs were limited and mainly restricted to basic skin-to-skin contact or tactile interventions. The interventions had similar general positive effects on mothers and fathers when it came to infant physiological and behavioural reactions. There was also evidence of a positive effect on the fathers, including their mental health. CONCLUSION: Including fathers as active partners in the care of their preterm newborn infants produced good outcomes for both of them. Further research is needed to develop new, multimodal and interactive interventions that provide fathers with positive contact with their preterm infants.

Changes in the vocal qualities of mothers and fathers are related to preterm infant's behavioural states.

AIM: Little is known about infant-directed speech addressed to preterm infants. The current study investigated the association between changes in preterm infant behavioural states and acoustical qualities of both maternal and paternal infant-directed speech. METHODS: The mothers and fathers of 11 preterm infants participated in the study. Parents in turn were asked to talk freely to their infant over a 5-minute period. A total of 72 audio sequences were selected and analysed as a function of the behavioural states. RESULTS: Acoustic analysis showed that the vocal qualities of both fathers' and mothers' speech were influenced by infant behaviour. Parental infant-directed speech was characterised by higher loudness and spectral related parameters when preterm infants were sleeping, or transiting from one state to another, than when they were awake. Furthermore, loudness and spectral flux were higher in maternal speech than in paternal speech and fathers used higher pitch, jitter and shimmer when they saw their preterm infant in an awake state, demonstrating that alertness in infants modulates the father's voice. CONCLUSION: More research is needed to know whether other social partners' vocal qualities may also be related to infant behavioural state as such findings would have implications for clinical practice.

Exposure to human voices has beneficial effects on preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit.

We reviewed the literature up to March 2016 on the effects of nonmaternal voices on preterm infants' clinical outcomes. Of the 11 studies that met the inclusion criteria, 10 focused on short-term outcomes and one looked at long-term effects. The studies mainly showed that vocal stimuli increased preterm infants' stability in terms of heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation and behavioural measures. Improvements in feeding skills were also reported. The methods and the measures used in the studies were heterogeneous, making it difficult to draw reliable conclusions. CONCLUSION: Vocal stimuli increased preterm infants' stability, but further studies are needed.

Humour production may enhance observational learning of a new tool-use action in 18-month-old infants.

Many studies have shown that making children laugh enhances certain cognitive capacities such as attention, motivation, perception and/or memory, which in turn enhance learning. However, no study thus far has investigated whether laughing has an effect on learning earlier in infancy. The goal of this study was to see whether using humour with young infants in a demonstration of a complex tool-use task can enhance their learning. Fifty-three 18-month-old infants participated in this study and were included either in a humorous or a control demonstration group. In both groups infants observed an adult using a tool to retrieve an out-of-reach toy. What differed between groups was that in the humorous demonstration group, instead of playing with the toy, the adult threw it on the floor immediately after retrieval. The results show that infants who laughed at the demonstration in the humorous demonstration group reproduced significantly more frequent target actions than infants who did not laugh and those in the control group. This effect is discussed with regard to individual differences in terms of temperament and social capacities as well as positive emotion and dopamine release.

Handedness for grasping objects and declarative pointing: a longitudinal study.

It is still unclear whether infants become right-handed because of their left-hemisphere specialization for language (through gestural communication for instance), whether they speak predominantly with their left hemisphere because of this hemisphere's superiority in controlling sequential actions which first results in right-handedness, or whether the two lateralization processes develop independently. To tackle this question, we followed 26 human infants from 8 to 20 months to evaluate the temporal relationship between the emergence of hand preference for grasping objects and for declarative pointing (communicative gesture). Our results show that when grasping and pointing are compared in similar conditions, with objects presented in several spatial positions, the tendency to use the right hand is significantly larger for pointing than for grasping, and both hand preferences are loosely correlated. This suggests that, at least at the age studied here, hand preferences for grasping and for declarative pointing develop relatively independently.

Effects of screen exposure on young children's cognitive development: A review.

The past decade has witnessed a rapid increase in the use of screen media in families, and infants are exposed to screens at younger ages than ever before. The objective of this review is twofold: (1) to understand the correlates and demographic factors determining exposure to screens, including interactive screens, when available, and (2) to study the effects of watching screens and using touchscreens on cognitive development, during the first 3 years of life. We argue that the effects of screen viewing depend mostly on contextual aspects of the viewing rather than on the quantity of viewing. That context includes the behavior of adult caregivers during viewing, the watched content in relation to the child's age, the interactivity of the screen and whether the screen is in the background or not. Depending on the context, screen viewing can have positive, neutral or negative effects on infants' cognition.

Handedness for grasping objects and pointing and the development of language in 14-month-old infants.

The goal of this study was to evaluate the relationship between object-related handedness and handedness for communicative gestures. We observed 22 infants aged 14 months on a baby laterality test consisting of grasping objects in different conditions, on a pointing task with targets placed out of reach at different spatial positions from left to right, and on word understanding and word production. Results show that 77% of infants pointed to the left, middle, and right targets. The majority of infants were right-handed for pointing--except for the far left target--and, to a lesser extent, for grasping objects, but there was no significant relation between the two measures of handedness. The frequency of pointing tended to be related to the number of words understood, and infants right-handed for pointing understood and produced significantly more words than non-right-handed pointers. These results are interpreted as confirming the link between pointing and language development, and as showing that communicative gesture lateralisation is not a mere consequence of object-related handedness, at least during development. Whether lateralised communicative gesture reinforces a pre-existing tendency to use the right hand to interact with objects remains an open question.

Racial Categorization and Intergroup Relations in Children: The Role of Social Status and Numerical Group Size.

The aim of this review was to examine the effect of social and numerical group size on racial categorization and intergroup relations in children. We first described the development of racial categorization and the factors that increase the saliency of the race criterion in different contexts. Then, we examine the role of social status in intergroups relations and show that low status children express lower ingroup favoritism compared to their peers from high status groups. Few studies investigated the role of ingroup size on intergroup biases. Here, we look at this numerical variable through the proportion of children of different racial groups in the school environment. The results show that homogeneous environments contribute to the decrease of bias and negative attitudes. We discuss how identifying specific and interactive effects of the social and numerical group size would allow us to implement early and efficient intervention programs.

One Function One Tool? A Review on Mutual Exclusivity in Tool Use Learning in Human and Non-human Species.

The goal of this review is twofold: first to explore whether mutual exclusivity and functional fixedness overlap and what might be their respective specificities and second, to investigate whether mutual exclusivity as an inferential principle could be applied in other domains than language and whether it can be found in non-human species. In order to do that, we first give an overview of the representative studies of each phenomenon. We then analyze papers on tool use learning in children that studied or observed one of these phenomena. We argue that, despite their common principle -one tool one function- mutual exclusivity and functional fixedness are two distinct phenomena and need to be addressed separately in order to fully understand the mechanisms underlying social learning and cognition. In addition, mutual exclusivity appears to be applicable in other domains than language learning, namely tool use learning and is also found in non-human species when learning symbols and tools.

Detection of sensorimotor contingencies in infants before the age of 1 year: A comprehensive review.

To benefit from the exploration of their bodies and their physical and social environments, infants need to detect sensorimotor contingencies linking their actions to sensory feedback. This ability, which seems to be present in babies from birth and even in utero, has been widely used by researchers in their study of early development. However, a careful review of the literature, particularly the recent literature, suggests that babies may not be uniformly sensitive to all sensorimotor contingencies. This literature review examines in detail sensorimotor contingency detection in infants before the age of 1 year. Four aspects of sensorimotor contingency detection are considered: characteristics of action and feedback, contingency parameters, exposure conditions, and interindividual differences. For each topic, we highlight what favors and what hinders the detection of sensorimotor contingencies in infants. Our review also demonstrates the limitations of our knowledge about sensorimotor contingency detection. We emphasize the importance of making progress in this field at a time when sensorimotor contingency detection is of major interest in developmental robotics and artificial intelligence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The effect of language on prosocial behaviors in preschool children.

The present study investigated how linguistic group membership influences prosocial behaviors, namely helpfulness and cooperation, in preschool children. Whilst research indicates that children preferentially direct their prosocial behavior towards members of their own groups, the influence of perceived linguistic group membership on actual helpfulness and cooperation has not been investigated. We presented an experimenter to 4- and 5-year-olds either as a foreigner, who did not speak the local language or as a native person. Children were then given the opportunity to help or cooperate with this experimenter in a series of nonverbal playful tasks. Whilst 4-year-olds helped and cooperated equally with the foreign and the native experimenter, 5-year-olds required significantly more cues and prompts in order to help or cooperate in the foreign condition. We also found that children were overall more reluctant to respond prosocially in the cooperation tasks than in the helping tasks. We tested children in two European countries (France and Hungary) and found the same pattern of responses in the two locations, suggesting that our findings are not specific to the local culture. Our results extend the findings of earlier research that showed selectivity according to the language spoken by the partner for sharing and imitation. Studies that looked at helpfulness or cooperation used the minimal group paradigm to induce group membership (based on arbitrary cues) and used indirect measures of prosociality, such as different forms of reasoning about the partner. In our study, we used language, a natural cue for group membership (versus arbitrary cues or cues based on social conventions) and directly observed children's helpful and cooperative behaviors toward the experimenter. Our results also confirm previous results indicating that with age, children become selective in their prosocial behaviors as they acquire new means of social evaluation and categorization. We conclude that the language associated with a potential social partner is not only a cue for affiliation and shared knowledge but also a cue mediating children's prosocial acts.

Development of body knowledge as measured by arm differentiation in infants: From global to local?

The ability to sense and use the body parts in an organized and differentiated manner is a precursor of body knowledge in infancy. To acquire this ability, the infant's brain might explore the perceptual consequences of its bodily actions. Undifferentiated body movements would gradually be replaced by more precise actions. Only a very few studies have tested this 'global-to-local' hypothesis, and none of them have so far been replicated. In this study, we assessed arm differentiation in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants using a new contingency detection task in which infants have to detect a contingency between one of their arms' activity and an audiovisual stimulus on a screen. We found that 4- to 8-month-old infants seem to be able to use their arms in a differentiated manner. However, surprisingly, we were not able to show a developmental trend in arm differentiation between 4 and 8 months of age. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Foetuses and infants possess coarse control of their body and may be sensitive to sensory feedback caused by their own movements. Body knowledge might develop during the first year of life in what can be called a 'global-to-local' manner. Nevertheless, the precise age at which infants come to possess well-differentiated local body knowledge requires further investigation. What the present study adds? 4- to 8-month-old infants seem able to use their arms in a differentiated manner when exposed to an audiovisual stimulation contingent on movements of one of their arms. However, we found no developmental trend in arm differentiation between 4 and 8 months of age. We hypothesize that infants' sensitivity to sensorimotor contingencies and their ability to narrow down contingencies to a specific limb might evolve with age as a function of the infant's current sensorimotor interests.

Atypical functional lateralization in children with fetal alcohol syndrome.

In order to explore effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on functional lateralization, item tasks measuring preferences of hand, foot, eye, and ear were administered to a sample of 23 children diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) compared with typically developing (TD) children. In addition, a dichotic listening task was administered to a subsample of 11 children with FAS and a TD group of comparable age, sex and handedness. The children with FAS were characterized by increased nonright-handedness compared with TD children. No differences were evident for preferential use of foot, eye, or ear. Moreover, children with FAS displayed more right ear extinctions during dichotic listening relative to TD children, indicating a lack of right ear advantage. The results add to findings of decreased manual asymmetry and less left-lateralized speech perception in children with developmental disorders, and are further discussed in relation to the high incidence of callosal abnormalities in alcohol-exposed children.

Fetal Origin of Sensorimotor Behavior.

The aim of this article is to track the fetal origin of infants' sensorimotor behavior. We consider development as the self-organizing emergence of complex forms from spontaneously generated activity, governed by the innate capacity to detect and memorize the consequences of spontaneous activity (contingencies), and constrained by the sensory and motor maturation of the body. In support of this view, we show how observations on fetuses and also several fetal experiments suggest that the fetus's first motor activity allows it to feel the space around it and to feel its body and the consequences of its movements on its body. This primitive motor babbling gives way progressively to sensorimotor behavior which already possesses most of the characteristics of infants' later behavior: repetition of actions leading to sensations, intentionality, some motor control and oriented reactions to sensory stimulation. In this way the fetus can start developing a body map and acquiring knowledge of its limited physical and social environment.

The Relative Importance of Language in Guiding Social Preferences Through Development.

In this paper, we review evidence from infants, toddlers, and preschoolers to tackle the question of how individuals orient preferences and actions toward social partners and how these preferences change over development. We aim at emphasizing the importance of language in guiding categorization relatively to other cues such as age, race and gender. We discuss the importance of language as part of a communication system that orients infants and older children's attention toward relevant information in their environment and toward affiliated social partners who are potential sources of knowledge. We argue that other cues (visually perceptible features) are less reliable in informing individuals whether others share a common knowledge and whether they can be source of information.

What Does It Take for an Infant to Learn How to Use a Tool by Observation?

Observational learning is probably one of the most powerful factors determining progress during child development. When learning a new skill, infants rely on their own exploration; but they also frequently benefit from an adult's verbal support or from demonstration by an adult modeling the action. At what age and under what conditions does adult demonstration really help the infant to learn a novel behavior? In this review, we summarize recently published work we have conducted on the acquisition of tool use during the second year of life. In particular, we consider under what conditions and to what extent seeing a demonstration from an adult advances an infant's understanding of how to use a tool to obtain an out-of-reach object. Our results show that classic demonstration starts being helpful at 18 months of age. When adults explicitly show their intention prior to demonstration, even 16-month-old infants learn from the demonstration. On the other hand, providing an explicit demonstration ("look at how I do it") is not very useful before infants are ready to succeed by themselves anyway. In contrast, repeated observations of the required action in a social context, without explicit reference to this action, considerably advances the age of success and the usefulness of providing a demonstration. We also show that the effect of demonstration can be enhanced if the demonstration makes the baby laugh. Taken together, the results from this series of studies on observational learning of tool use in infants suggest, first, that when observing a demonstration, infants do not know what to pay attention to: demonstration must be accompanied by rich social cues to be effective; second, infants' attention is inhibited rather than enhanced by an explicit demand of "look at what I do"; and finally a humorous situation considerably helps infants understand the demonstration.

Mimicry Enhances Observational Learning in 16-Month-Old Infants.

We examined the effect of mimicry on how 16-month-old infants learn by observation a novel tool use action, which consisted of using a rake to retrieve a toy. Across four conditions, we manipulated whether during an initial play phase, an adult mimicked the infant's play or not (testing the effect of mimicry), the infant played with the adult or played alone (controlling the effect of interacting with a contingent partner) and whether the infant saw a demonstration of the tool's use or not (evaluating baseline performance). We found that infants who had been mimicked learned best from a demonstration of the rake's use and performed better than infants who only played with the experimenter without mimicry or played by themselves before the demonstration. As expected, infants did not learn from a demonstration of the rake's use when they played by themselves and thus had no previous interaction with an experimenter. The mechanisms driving this powerful learning effect of mimicry are discussed.