The role of maternal trauma and discipline types in emotional processing among Syrian refugee children.

Stressful experiences in armed conflict incur intergenerational effects through parental behaviors with their children. A recent study reported that among Syrian refugee families, mothers' (but not fathers') post-traumatic stress (PTS) impacted children's emotional processing. In this study, we aim to shed further light on this phenomenon by analyzing how the parenting practices in the context of post-traumatic stress confers protection or risk for children's emotional processing. Participants were 6-18-year-old children (n = 212) and their mothers (n = 94), who fled from Syria and were residing in Turkish communities. We used the computer-based emotional processing task including photos of facial movements typically associated with different emotions to measure children's capacity for emotional processing. Mothers reported their PTS and the discipline types they use, as well as the contextual factors related to their refugee background. Linear mixed effect models were constructed first, to find out the discipline types that are most strongly associated with emotional processing of the child, and second, to examine whether these discipline types moderate the effect of maternal PTS on children's emotional processing. Finally, generalized linear models were constructed to examine which contextual factors are associated with the use of these discipline types by mothers. We found that spanking as a discipline type was associated with poorer child emotional processing, whereas withholding of media access was associated with better emotional processing. Younger and less religious mothers were more prone to use spanking. The study underlines the need for parenting programs alongside with efforts to address mental health issues among mothers living under armed conflict.

Predicting children's emerging understanding of numbers.

How do children construct a concept of natural numbers? Past research addressing this question has mainly focused on understanding how children come to acquire the cardinality principle. However, at that point children already understand the first number words and have a rudimentary natural number concept in place. The question therefore remains; what gets children's number learning off the ground? We therefore, based on previous empirical and theoretical work, tested which factors predict the first stages of children's natural number understanding. We assessed if children's expressive vocabulary, visuospatial working memory, and ANS (Approximate number system) acuity at 18 months of age could predict their natural number knowledge at 2.5 years of age. We found that early expressive vocabulary and visuospatial working memory were important for later number knowledge. The results of the current study add to a growing body of literature showing the importance of language in children's learning about numbers.

High quality social environment buffers infants' cognitive development from poor maternal mental health: Evidence from a study in Bhutan.

Poor maternal mental health negatively impacts cognitive development from infancy to childhood, affecting both behavior and brain architecture. In a non-western context (Thimphu, Bhutan), we demonstrate that culturally-moderated factors such as family, community social support, and enrichment may buffer and scaffold the development of infant cognition when maternal mental health is poor. We used eye-tracking to measure early building blocks of cognition: attention regulation and social perception, in 9-month-old Bhutanese infants (N = 121). The cognitive development of Bhutanese infants in richer social environments was buffered from poor maternal mental health, while for infants in environments with lower rates of protective social environment factors, worse maternal mental health significantly predicted greater costs for infant attention, a fundamental building block cognition. International policies and interventions geared to improve maternal mental health and child health outcomes should incorporate each regions' unique family, cultural, and community support structures.

Methodological integrity assessment in the mobile paradigm literature: A lesson for understanding opportunistic use of researcher degrees of freedom in psychology.

The mobile paradigm has played a fundamental role in memory development research. One key characteristic of the mobile paradigm literature is that across decades, researchers have faithfully followed a particular methodological protocol with its own unique definitions of learning and memory. To investigate the extent to which these methodological choices affected the results, the literature (77 publications and 505 statistical tests) was evaluated for four frequently encountered research biases. The results suggested that research using the paradigm was conducted with scientific rigor. However, methodological choices along with unique operational definitions of learning and memory accounted for more than half of the findings. Thus, the literature has been contaminated by methodological artifacts due to the opportunistic use of researcher degrees of freedom.

A Pre-registered sticky mittens study: active training does not increase reaching and grasping in a swedish context.

Several studies have previously investigated the effects of sticky mittens training on reaching and grasping development. However, recent critique casted doubts on the robustness of the motor effect of this training. The current study presents a pre-registered report that aimed to generalize these effects to Swedish infants. Three-month-old infants N = 96, 51 females, mostly White middle class in Uppsala, received daily, parent-led sticky mittens or observational training for 2 weeks or no training in 2019. Reaching and grasping abilities were assessed before and after training, using motion tracking and a 4-step reaching task. Sticky mittens training did not facilitate successful reaching. These results indicate that beneficial motor effects of sticky mittens training did not generalize to this sample.

Learning limb-specific contingencies in early infancy.

Most research with the mobile paradigm has the underlying assumption that young infants can selectively move the limb causing the contingent feedback from the mobile while avoiding irrelevant motor responses. Contrary to this long-held belief, others have argued that such differentiation ability is not fully developed early in life. In the current study, we revisited the traditional mobile paradigm with a contemporary research approach (using high-precision motion capture techniques, a yoked-control design, and a large sample size) to investigate whether response differentiation ability emerges before 5 months of age. The data collected from 76 infants (aged between 115 and 159 days) revealed that infants can learn sensorimotor contingencies by increasing the movement of the connected leg relative to their baseline level. However, they did not differentially increase the movement of the leg causing an effect in the environment compared with that of other limbs. Our results illustrate that response differentiation ability emerges later than previously suggested.

Statistical learning in infancy predicts vocabulary size in toddlerhood.

During the first 2 years of life, an infant's vocabulary grows at an impressive rate. In the current study, we investigated the impact of three challenges that infants need to overcome to learn new words and expand the size of their vocabulary. We used longitudinal eye-tracking data (n = 118) to assess sequence learning, associative learning, and probability processing abilities at ages 6, 10, and 18 months. Infants' ability to efficiently solve these tasks was used to predict vocabulary size at age 18 months. We demonstrate that the ability to make audio-visual associations and to predict sequences of visual events predicts vocabulary size in toddlers (accounting for 20% of the variance). Our results indicate that statistical learning in some, but not all, domains have a role in vocabulary development.

The sticky mittens paradigm: A critical appraisal of current results and explanations.

Almost two decades ago, the sticky mittens paradigm was demonstrated as a way to train reaching and grasping behaviors in pre-reaching infants, and consequently improve visual attentional abilities. In that first study, Needham and colleagues fitted 3-month-old infants with Velcro loop-covered mittens and allowed them to interact with Velcro hook-covered toys over the course of 2 weeks. In this review, we scrutinize the 17 studies that have followed those first sticky mittens results in regards to the motor, social perception, and visual attentional domains. Furthermore, we discuss the proposed mechanisms of the sticky mittens training. Current evidence strongly suggests that sticky mittens training facilitates social perception, which is consistent with prior correlational work showing links between action production and action perception. However, studies targeting motor and visual attentional abilities have too diverse results to warrant firm conclusions. We conclude that future research should focus on uncovering if there is a connection between sticky mittens training and motor behavior.

Social interaction targets enhance 13-month-old infants' associative learning.

Infants are attentive to third-party interactions, but the underlying mechanisms of this preference remain understudied. This study examined whether 13-month-old infants (N = 32) selectively learn cue-target associations guiding them to videos depicting a social interaction scene. In a visual learning task, two geometrical shapes were repeatedly paired with two kinds of target videos: two adults interacting with one another (social interaction) or the same adults acting individually (non-interactive control). Infants performed faster saccadic latencies and more predictive gaze shifts toward the cued target region during social interaction trials. These findings suggest that social interaction targets can serve as primary reinforcers in an associative learning task, supporting the view that infants find it intrinsically valuable to observe others' interactions.

An embodied account of teleological processes.

We emphasize a need for more research and propose our own theoretical framework, the embodied account of teleological processes, to try to explain the inconsistencies in the teleological stance literature and fill the gap in the teleological framework.

The teleological stance: Past, present, and future.

We review the support for, and criticisms of, the teleological stance theory, often described as a foundation for goal-directed action understanding early in life. A major point of contention in the literature has been how teleological processes and assumptions of rationality are represented and understood in infancy, and this debate has been largely centered on three paradigms. Visual habituation studies assess infant's abilities to retrospectively assess teleological processes; the presence of such processes is supported by the literature. Rational imitation is a phenomenon that has been questioned both theoretically and empirically, and there is currently little support for this concept in the literature. The involvement of teleological processes in action prediction is unclear. To date, the ontology of teleological processes remains unspecified. To remedy this, we present a new action-based theory of teleological processes (here referred to as the embodied account of teleological processes), based on the development of goal-directed reaching with its origin during the fetal period and continuous development over the first few months of life.

Play enhances visual form perception in infancy-an active training study.

Motor experiences and active exploration during early childhood may affect individual differences in a wide range of perceptual and cognitive abilities. In the current study, we suggest that active exploration of objects facilitates the ability to process object forms and magnitudes, which in turn impacts the development of numerosity perception. We tested our hypothesis by conducting a preregistered active exploration intervention with 59 8-month-old infants. The minimal intervention consisted of actively playing with and exploring blocks once a day for 8 weeks. In order to control for possible training effects on attention, we used book reading as a control condition. Pre- and post-test assessments using eye-tracking showed that block play improved visual form perception, where infants became better at detecting a deviant shape. Furthermore, using three control tasks, we showed that the intervention specifically improved infants' ability to process visual forms and the effect could not be explained by a domain general improvement in attention or visual perception. We found that the intervention did not improve numerosity perception and suggest that because of the sequential nature of our hypothesis, a longer time frame might be needed to see improvements in this ability. Our findings indicate that if infants are given more opportunities for play and exploration, it will have positive effects on their visual form perception, which in turn could help their understanding of geometrical concepts.

The social foundation of executive function.

In this study, we propose that infant social cognition may 'bootstrap' the successive development of domain-general cognition in line with the cultural intelligence hypothesis. Using a longitudinal design, 6-month-old infants (N = 118) were assessed on two basic social cognitive tasks targeting the abilities to share attention with others and understanding other peoples' actions. At 10 months, we measured the quality of the child's social learning environment, indexed by parent's abilities to provide scaffolding behaviors during a problem-solving task. Eight months later, the children were followed up with a cognitive test-battery, including tasks of inhibitory control and working memory. Our results showed that better infant social action understanding interacted with better parental scaffolding skills in predicting simple inhibitory control in toddlerhood. This suggests that infants' who are better at understanding other's actions are also better equipped to make the most of existing social learning opportunities, which in turn may benefit future non-social cognitive outcomes.

Two-step actions in infancy-the TWAIN model.

In this paper, we propose a novel model-the TWAIN model-to describe the durations of two-step actions in a reach-to-place task in human infants. Previous research demonstrates that infants and adults plan their actions across multiple steps. They adjust, for instance, the velocity of a reaching action depending on what they intend to do with the object once it is grasped. Despite these findings and irrespective of the larger context in which the action occurs, current models (e.g., Fitts' law) target single, isolated actions, as, for example, pointing to a goal. In the current paper, we develop and empirically test a more ecologically valid model of two-step action planning. More specifically, 61 18-month olds took part in a reach-to-place task and their reaching and placing durations were measured with a motion-capture system. Our model explained the highest amount of variance in placing duration and outperformed six previously suggested models, when using model comparison. We show that including parameters of the first action step, here the duration of the reaching action, can improve the description of the second action step, here the duration of the placing action. This move towards more ecologically valid models of action planning contributes knowledge as well as a framework for assessing human machine interactions. The TWAIN model provides an updated way to quantify motor learning by the time these abilities develop, which might help to assess performance in typically developing human children.

Longitudinal Continuity in Understanding and Production of Giving-Related Behavior From Infancy to Childhood.

Infants have an early understanding of giving (the transfer of an item by one agent to another), but little is known about individual differences in these abilities or their developmental outcomes. Here, 9-month-olds (N = 59) showing clearer neural processing (Event-related potential, ERP) of a give-me gesture also evidenced a stronger reaction (pupil dilation) to an inappropriate response to a give-me gesture, and at 2 years were more likely to give in response to a give-me gesture. None of the differences in understanding and production of giving-related behaviors were associated with other sociocognitive variables investigated: language, gaze-following, and nongiving helping. The early developmental continuity in understanding and production of giving behavior is consistent with the great importance of giving for humans throughout the life span.

Gaze following in 4.5- and 6-month-old infants: The impact of proximity on standard gaze following performance tests.

Gaze following (GF), the ability to synchronize visual attention with others, is often considered a foundation of social cognition. In this study, GF was assessed while changing the space between an actor's eyes and the gaze target. This was done to address a potential confound in the gold standard GF performance test, namely the spatial bias of the actors' eye position that occurs when the actor turns the head to look at a target, offsetting the eye position from a centered position toward the attended target. Our results suggest that both 4.5 (n = 27) and 6 (n = 30)-month-old infants can follow an actor's gaze regardless of proximity. This is the first demonstration that early GF is not dependent on proximity cues, and our results strengthen previous findings suggesting that GF develops well before 6 months of age. The study was preregistered, and all data and analysis routines can be downloaded with provided links.

The Developmental Origins of Gaze-Following in Human Infants.

During the first year of life, infants develop the capacity to follow the gaze of others. This behavior allows sharing attention and facilitates language acquisition and cognitive development. This article reviews studies that investigated gaze-following before 12 months of age in typically developing infants and discusses current theoretical perspectives on early GF. Recent research has revealed that early GF is highly dependent on situational constraints and individual characteristics, but theories that describe the underlying mechanisms have partly failed to consider this complexity. We propose a novel framework termed the perceptual narrowing account of GF that may have the potential to integrate existing theoretical accounts.

Attention during Visual Preference Tasks: Relation to Caregiving and Face Recognition.

This research examined how caregiver experience (female primary caregiver or distributed caregiving with mom and dad) influenced 10-, 14-, and 16-month-olds' visual preferences and attention toward internal facial features of female-male face pairs, and how these behaviors related to novelty preferences in a face recognition task and speed and accuracy on a visual search task. In the visual preference task, infants visually preferred male faces, regardless of caregiver experience. Despite similarities in visual preferences, infants' attention toward females and males' internal facial features was related for infants with distributed caregiving only. Infants' performance across face processing tasks most often correlated for those with female primary caregivers. Results further our understanding of how infants with female primary caregivers display specialized processing of female faces, and how infants with distributed caregiving show similarities in their attention to female and male facial features.

Reduced orienting to audiovisual synchrony in infancy predicts autism diagnosis at 3 years of age.

BACKGROUND: Effective multisensory processing develops in infancy and is thought to be important for the perception of unified and multimodal objects and events. Previous research suggests impaired multisensory processing in autism, but its role in the early development of the disorder is yet uncertain. Here, using a prospective longitudinal design, we tested whether reduced visual attention to audiovisual synchrony is an infant marker of later-emerging autism diagnosis. METHODS: We studied 10-month-old siblings of children with autism using an eye tracking task previously used in studies of preschoolers. The task assessed the effect of manipulations of audiovisual synchrony on viewing patterns while the infants were observing point light displays of biological motion. We analyzed the gaze data recorded in infancy according to diagnostic status at 3 years of age (DSM-5). RESULTS: Ten-month-old infants who later received an autism diagnosis did not orient to audiovisual synchrony expressed within biological motion. In contrast, both infants at low-risk and high-risk siblings without autism at follow-up had a strong preference for this type of information. No group differences were observed in terms of orienting to upright biological motion. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that reduced orienting to audiovisual synchrony within biological motion is an early sign of autism. The findings support the view that poor multisensory processing could be an important antecedent marker of this neurodevelopmental condition.