Context dependent cognitive development in Bhutanese children.

We assessed risk/protective factors for cognitive development of Bhutanese children (504 3-5 year-olds, 49% girls, major ethnicities Ngalop 26%, Tshangla 30%, Lhotsampa 34%) using a non-verbal test of cognitive capacity (SON-R) and primary caregiver interviews. Cognitive capacity was related to the family's SES and whether the family belonged to the primary Buddhist majority ethnic groups (Ngalop or Tshangla) or primarily Hindu minorities (Lhotsampa). In majority families more engagement in Buddhist practices was associated with higher cognitive capacity in children. Minority children were more impacted by parents autonomous-relatedness values. Results demonstrate that cognitive development is dependent on the financial and educational context of the family, societal events, and culture specific risk/protective factors that differ across sub-groups (majority/minority, culture/religion).

Corrigendum: Making the world behave: A new embodied account on mobile paradigm.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnsys.2021.643526.].

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.

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.

Making the World Behave: A New Embodied Account on Mobile Paradigm.

In this review article, we describe the mobile paradigm, a method used for more than 50 years to assess how infants learn and remember sensorimotor contingencies. The literature on the mobile paradigm demonstrates that infants below 6 months of age can remember the learning environment weeks after when reminded periodically and integrate temporally distributed information across modalities. The latter ability is only possible if events occur within a temporal window of a few days, and the width of this required window changes as a function of age. A major critique of these conclusions is that the majority of this literature has neglected the embodied experience, such that motor behavior was considered an equivalent developmental substitute for verbal behavior. Over recent years, simulation and empirical work have highlighted the sensorimotor aspect and opened up a discussion for possible learning mechanisms and variability in motor preferences of young infants. In line with this recent direction, we present a new embodied account on the mobile paradigm which argues that learning sensorimotor contingencies is a core feature of development forming the basis for active exploration of the world and body. In addition to better explaining recent findings, this new framework aims to replace the dis-embodied approach to the mobile paradigm with a new understanding that focuses on variance and representations grounded in sensorimotor experience. Finally, we discuss a potential role for the dorsal stream which might be responsible for guiding action according to visual information, while infants learn sensorimotor contingencies in the mobile paradigm.