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Memory develops across the course of the first years of life and is influenced by daily experiences, such as exposure to media like books and television. Memory as tapped by Deferred imitation (DI) requires that toddlers form a representation of the target actions that they can later use to reproduce the actions and in addition to measuring memory for real live events, it can also be used to measure memory for events viewed through media. Toddlers are frequently exposed to multiple forms of digital media in addition to more traditional forms of picture book reading. In a within-subjects design, memory was assessed with a DI task in 2-year-olds (n = 89) using the Frankfurt Imitation Test. Deferred imitation was assessed after live and video demonstrations. Parents completed a survey about children's media use. Picture book reading for less than 30 min a day predicted lower memory scores for actions demonstrated live. Watching video content for more than 1 h a day predicted lower memory scores for actions demonstrated on video. Results are interpreted in terms of individual differences in experiences of traditional and digital media and the development of symbolic understanding.
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Livros , Memória , Leitura , Humanos , Pré-Escolar , Feminino , Masculino , Desenvolvimento Infantil , Televisão , Comportamento ImitativoRESUMO
AIM: This study addresses the scarcity of longitudinal research on the influence of screen media on children. It aims to explore the longitudinal relationship between children's vocabulary development and their exposure to screen media. METHODS: The study, initiated in 2017, included 72 children (37 boys) in Östergötland, Sweden, at three key developmental stages: preverbal (9.7 months), early verbal (25.5 months) and preliterate (5.4 years). Parents completed online surveys at each time point, reporting their child's screen time. At 10 months and 2 years, age-appropriate vocabulary assessments were conducted online. At age 5, children's vocabulary was laboratory assessed. RESULTS: Correlational analysis revealed a negative relationship between language scores and screen media use across all time points. Furthermore, a cross-lagged panel model demonstrated that screen media use showed significant continuity over time, with screen use at age 2 predicting language development at ages 2 and 5. CONCLUSION: This longitudinal study, spanned from 9 months to 5 years of age, established a predictive negative association between children's exposure to screen media and their vocabulary development. These findings underscore the need to consider the impact of screen media on early childhood development and may inform guidelines for screen media use in young children.
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Desenvolvimento Infantil , Vocabulário , Masculino , Criança , Humanos , Pré-Escolar , Estudos Longitudinais , Desenvolvimento da Linguagem , IdiomaRESUMO
Although prior research has independently linked vocabulary development with toddlers' media usage, parental mental state talk (MST), and parent-child conversational turn-taking (CTT), these variables have not been investigated within the same study. In this study, we focus on associations between these variables and 2-year-old's (N = 87) vocabulary. Child vocabulary and digital media use were measured through online questionnaires. We took a multimethod approach to measure parents' child-directed talk. First, we used a home sound environment recording (Language ENvironment Analysis technology) to estimate parents' talk (CTT). Second, parents narrated a picture book, the Frog story, to assess the parent's MST. There was a negative association between how much children watched video content and their vocabulary. However, parents reported that they frequently co-viewed and engaged with the child and media. The negative association first displayed between the amount of video content viewed and the child's developing vocabulary was fully mediated by the parents' qualitative and quantitative talk as measured by MST and CCT, respectively. We propose that the parent relative level of MST and CTT also occurs when parents engage with the child during media use.
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Relações Pais-Filho , Vocabulário , Humanos , Internet , Desenvolvimento da Linguagem , PaisRESUMO
Digital media (DM), such as cellphones and tablets, are a common part of our daily lives and their usage has changed the communication structure within families. Thus, there is a risk that the use of DM might result in fewer opportunities for interactions between children and their parents leading to fewer language learning moments for young children. The current study examined the associations between children's language development and early DM exposure. Participants: Ninety-two parents of 25months olds (50 boys/42 girls) recorded their home sound environment during a typical day [Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA)] and participated in an online questionnaire consisting of questions pertaining to daily DM use and media mediation strategies, as well as a Swedish online version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory, which includes a vocabulary scale as well as a grammar and pragmatics scale. Results: Through correlations and stepwise regressions three aspects of language were analyzed. The child's vocabulary was positively associated with interactional turn-taking. The child's vocabulary and grammar were negatively associated with the likelihood of parent's device use during everyday child routines and the amount of TV watched by the child. The child's pragmatic development was also positively associated with the parent's device use in child routines but also with the parent's joint media engagement (JME), as well as the child's gender (where girls perform better). Conclusion: Our study confirms that specific aspects of the 2-year old's DM environment are associated with the child's language development. More TV content, whether it is viewed on a big screen or tablet, is negatively associated with language development. The likelihood of parents' use of DM during everyday child routines is also negatively associated with the child's language development. Positive linguistic parental strategies such as interactional turn-taking with the child, JME, and book reading, on the other hand, are positively associated with the child's language development.
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In the present study, we examined how an initial being imitated (BIm) strategy affected the development of initiating joint attention (IJA) among a group of children newly diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One group received 3 months of BIm followed by 12 months of intensive behavior treatment (IBT) which equaled treatment as usual whereas a second group received IBT for the entire 15-month study period. We utilized two measures of IJA: an eye gaze and a gesture score (point and show). IJA did not change during the first 3 months of treatment, nor were any significant between-group differences noted. However, at the end of the 15-month-long intervention period, the BIm group used eye gaze significantly more often to initiate joint attention. No significant change was noted for the gesture score. These results suggest that an early implementation of a being imitated strategy might be useful as less resource intensive but beneficial "start-up" intervention when combined with IBT treatment as a follow-up.
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The language environment is important for the development of early communication and language. In the current study, we describe the natural home language environment of 9-month-old infants in Sweden and its concurrent association with language development. Eighty-eight families took part in the study. The home language environment was measured using the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system, and language development was assessed using Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventory (SECDI), a parent questionnaire. LENA measures showed dramatic variation between individuals but were comparable to and showed overlapping variance with previous studies conducted in English-speaking households. Nonetheless, there were significantly more infant vocalizations and conversational turns in the present study than in one previous study. Adult word count correlated significantly and positively with infants' Use of gestures and the subscale of that section Communicative gestures. These together with another four non-significant associations formed a consistent overall pattern that suggested a link between infants' language environment and language development. Although the direction of causality cannot be determined from the current data, future studies should examine children longitudinally to assess the directionality or the bidirectionality of the reported associations between infant's language environment and language development.
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Digital media availability has surged over the past decade. Because of a lack of comprehensive measurement tools, this rapid growth in access to digital media is accompanied by a scarcity of research examining the family media context and sociocognitive outcomes. There is also little cross-cultural research in families with young children. Modern media are mobile, interactive, and often short in duration, making them difficult to remember when caregivers respond to surveys about media use. The Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure (CAFE) Consortium has developed a novel tool to measure household media use through a web-based questionnaire, time-use diary, and passive-sensing app installed on family mobile devices. The goal of developing a comprehensive assessment of family media exposure was to take into account the contextual factors of media use and improve upon the limitations of existing self-report measures, while creating a consistent, scalable, and cost-effective tool. The CAFE tool captures the content and context of early media exposure and addresses the limitations of prior media measurement approaches. Preliminary data collected using this measure have been integrated into a shared visualization platform. In this perspective article, we take a tools-of-the-trade approach (Oakes, 2010) to describe four challenges associated with measuring household media exposure in families with young children: measuring attitudes and practices; capturing content and context; measuring short bursts of mobile device usage; and integrating data to capture the complexity of household media usage. We illustrate how each of these challenges can be addressed with preliminary data collected with the CAFE tool and visualized on our dashboard. We conclude with future directions including plans to test reliability, validity, and generalizability of these measures.
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Digital media (DM) is omnipresent in society today and impacts every aspect of our life. Previous studies have shown DM to cause problems in interpersonal relationships by creating problematic interruptions in interactions, this has been termed technoference. The current study focuses on parent's self-rated perceived technoference and the rated behavior of their 4- to 5-year-old children. Parents (N = 153) filled out an online questionnaire regarding family DM use and technoference as well as questions regarding their child's behavior. Parents rated the level of technoference caused by their own use of DM as well as the rate of technoference caused by the child's use of DM. Parents were also asked questions regarding their own possible problematic cell phone use. The findings reveal a statistically significant contribution of technoference, caused by the parents' use of DM, to the behavior repertoire of the children.
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Comportamento Infantil/psicologia , Relações Familiares/psicologia , Internet , Pais/psicologia , Comportamento Problema/psicologia , Adulto , Pré-Escolar , Feminino , Humanos , Masculino , Inquéritos e QuestionáriosRESUMO
This article provides a description of eye movement data collected during an ocular-motor serial reaction time task. Raw gaze data files for 63 infants and 24 adults along with the data processing and analysis script for extracting saccade latencies, summarizing participants' performance, and testing statistical differences, are hosted on Open Science Framework (OSF). Files (in Matlab format) available for download allow for replication of the results reported in "Procedural memory in infancy: Evidence from implicit sequence learning in an eye-tracking paradigm" [1].
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Procedural memory underpins the learning of skills and habits. It is often tested in children and adults with sequence learning on the serial reaction time (SRT) task, which involves manual motor control. However, due to infants' slowly developing control of motor actions, most procedures that require motor control cannot be examined in infancy. Here, we investigated procedural memory using an SRT task adapted for infants. During the task, images appeared at one of three locations on a screen, with the location order following a five-item recurring sequence. Three blocks of recurring sequences were followed by a random-order fourth block and finally another block of recurring sequences. Eye movement data were collected for infants (nâ¯=â¯35) and adults (nâ¯=â¯31). Reaction time was indexed by calculating the saccade latencies for orienting to each image as it appeared. The entire protocol took less than 3â¯min. Sequence learning in the SRT task can be operationalized as an increase in latencies in the random block as compared with the preceding and following sequence blocks. This pattern was observed in both the infants and adults. This study is the first to report learning in an SRT task in infants as young as 9 â¯months. This SRT protocol is a promising procedure for measuring procedural memory in infants.
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Desenvolvimento Infantil/fisiologia , Memória/fisiologia , Aprendizagem Seriada/fisiologia , Percepção Visual/fisiologia , Adulto , Tecnologia de Rastreamento Ocular , Feminino , Humanos , Lactente , Masculino , Adulto JovemRESUMO
The study investigates to what degree two different joint media engagement (JME) strategies affect children's learning from two-dimensional (2D)-media. More specifically, we expected an instructed JME strategy to be more effective than a spontaneous, non-instructed, JME strategy. Thirty-five 2-year old children saw a short video on a tablet demonstrating memory tasks together with a parent. The parents were randomized into two groups: One group (N = 17) was instructed to help their child by describing the actions they saw on the video while the other group (N = 18) received no specific instruction besides "do as you usually do." The parents in the instructed group used significantly more words and verbs when supporting their child but both groups of children did equally well on the memory test. In a second step, we compared the performance of the two JME groups with an opportunistic comparison group (N = 95) tested with half of the memory tasks live and half of the tasks on 2D without any JME support. Results showed that the JME intervention groups received significantly higher recall scores than the no JME 2D comparison group. In contrast, the three-dimensional (3D) comparison group outperformed both JME groups. In sum, our findings suggest that JME as implemented here is more effective in promoting learning than a no JME 2D demonstration but less so than the standard 3D presentation of the tasks.
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Infants' early visual preferences for faces, and their observational learning abilities, are well-established in the literature. The current study examines how infants' attention changes as they become increasingly familiar with a person and the actions that person is demonstrating. The looking patterns of 12- (nâ¯=â¯61) and 16-month-old infants (nâ¯=â¯29) were tracked while they watched videos of an adult presenting novel actions with four different objects three times. A face-to-action ratio in visual attention was calculated for each repetition and summarized as a mean across all videos. The face-to-action ratio increased with each action repetition, indicating that there was an increase in attention to the face relative to the action each additional time the action was demonstrated. Infant's prior familiarity with the object used was related to face-to-action ratio in 12-month-olds and initial looking behavior was related to face-to-action ratio in the whole sample. Prior familiarity with the presenter, and infant gender and age, were not related to face-to-action ratio. This study has theoretical implications for face preference and action observations in dynamic contexts.
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Atenção/fisiologia , Movimentos Oculares/fisiologia , Comportamento do Lactente/fisiologia , Estimulação Luminosa/métodos , Reconhecimento Psicológico/fisiologia , Percepção Visual/fisiologia , Adulto , Técnicas de Observação do Comportamento/métodos , Estudos Transversais , Feminino , Humanos , Lactente , Comportamento do Lactente/psicologia , Masculino , Movimento/fisiologia , Gravação em Vídeo/métodosRESUMO
Saccade latency is widely used across infant psychology to investigate infants' understanding of events. Interpreting particular latency values requires knowledge of standard saccadic RTs, but there is no consensus as to typical values. This study provides standard estimates of infants' (n = 194, ages 9 to 15 months) saccadic RTs under a range of different spatiotemporal conditions. To investigate the reliability of such standard estimates, data is collected at 4 laboratories in 3 countries. Results indicate that reactions to the appearance of a new object are much faster than reactions to the deflection of a currently fixated moving object; upward saccades are slower than downward or horizontal saccades; reactions to more peripheral stimuli are much slower; and this slowdown is greater for boys than girls. There was little decrease in saccadic RTs between 9 and 15 months, indicating that the period of slow development which is protracted into adolescence begins in late infancy. Except for appearance and deflection differences, infant effects were weak or absent in adults (n = 40). Latency estimates and spatiotemporal effects on latency were generally consistent across laboratories, but a number of lab differences in factors such as individual variation were found. Some but not all differences were attributed to minor procedural differences, highlighting the importance of replication. Confidence intervals (95%) for infants' median reaction latencies for appearance stimuli were 242 to 250 ms and for deflection stimuli 350 to 367 ms. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Envelhecimento , Psicologia da Criança , Tempo de Reação/fisiologia , Movimentos Sacádicos/fisiologia , Caracteres Sexuais , Percepção Visual/fisiologia , Adulto , Feminino , Humanos , Lactente , Masculino , Modelos Estatísticos , Reprodutibilidade dos TestesRESUMO
Gergely et al. (2002) reported that children imitated a novel action - illuminating a light-box by using the forehead - after a delay significantly more often if the hands of the experimenter had been visible in comparison with if they had been covered. In an attempt to explore these findings we conducted two studies with a total N of 63 children. Both studies investigated deferred imitation of the action in two conditions, with the hands of the experimenter visible or covered, but the settings differed. Study 1 (n = 30; mean age = 16.6 months) was carried out in an unfamiliar environment (a laboratory setting) while Study 2 (n = 33; mean age = 13.3 months) was conducted in familiar surroundings (at home or at day care). The results showed that 50% of the children in Study 1 and 42.4% in Study 2 evidenced deferred imitation as compared to only 4.9% (n = 2) in the baseline condition. However, in none of the studies did the children use inferential processes when imitating, we detected no significant differences between the two conditions, hands visible or hands covered. The findings add to the validity of the head touch procedure as a measure of declarative-like memory processes in the pre-verbal child. At the same time the findings question the robustness of the concept 'rational imitation,' it seems not as easy as expected to elicit a response based on rational inferential processes in this age group.
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Deferred imitation (DI) may be regarded as an early declarative-like memory ability shaping the infant's ability to learn about novelties and regularities of the surrounding world. In the current longitudinal study, infants were assessed at 9 and 16months. DI was assessed using five novel objects. Each infant's communicative development was measured by parental questionnaires. The results indicate stability in DI performance and early communicative development between 9 and 16months. The early achievers at 9months were still advanced at 16months. Results also identified a predictive relationship between the infant's gestural development at 9months and the infant's productive and receptive language at 16months. Moreover, the results show that declarative memory, measured with DI, and gestural communication at 9months independently predict productive language at 16months. These findings suggest a connection between the ability to form non-linguistic and linguistic mental representations. These results indicate that the child's DI ability when predominantly preverbal might be regarded as an early domain-general declarative memory ability underlying early productive language development.
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Gestos , Comportamento Imitativo , Desenvolvimento da Linguagem , Idioma , Memória , Feminino , Humanos , Lactente , Estudos Longitudinais , Masculino , Pais , Inquéritos e QuestionáriosRESUMO
OBJECTIVE: To examine possible relations between parents' psychological stress and children's saliva cortisol levels in connection with a mild stressor (drawing a blood sample). METHOD: Parenting stress and serious life events at birth, age 1, age 2, age 5, and age 8 were assessed. Eighty-two paired saliva samples collected from their 8-year-old children just before and 30 min after blood was drawn were analyzed. RESULTS: Instead of increasing, cortisol levels significantly decreased. Repeated measures GLM indicated a significant relation between higher parenting stress at child age 1 and at age 8, and elevated cortisol levels. A t-test indicated that cortisol levels after the blood draw were significantly higher in children whose parents reported a serious life event at age 8. CONCLUSION: Parenting stress could be a relevant factor for children's adjustment of the HPA axis with long-term effects and leave children more vulnerable to experiences of stress.
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Hidrocortisona/sangue , Acontecimentos que Mudam a Vida , Relações Pais-Filho , Pais/psicologia , Estresse Psicológico/sangue , Adaptação Psicológica , Adulto , Distribuição de Qui-Quadrado , Criança , Pré-Escolar , Humanos , Lactente , Recém-Nascido , Estresse Psicológico/psicologia , Inquéritos e QuestionáriosRESUMO
OBJECTIVE: To examine whether there is a relationship between psychological stress in the family and obesity in 5- to 6-year-old children. STUDY DESIGN: A total of 7443 Swedish families reported on psychological stress across 4 domains as part of the prospective All Babies in Southeast Sweden-project (ABIS). Domains assessed included serious life events, parenting stress, lack of social support, and parental worries. These variables were summarized in cross-sectional and longitudinal composite measures of psychological stress. Logistic regression models were used to calculate odds ratios for childhood obesity for psychological stress. RESULTS: A total of 4.2% of the children were obese according to age-adjusted international standards. Children from families that reported stress in at least 2 of the 4 domains assessed had significantly higher adjusted odds ratios (OR) for obesity, both cross-sectionally (OR, 2.1; 95% CI, 1.3-3.5; P < .01) and longitudinally (OR, 2.6; 95% CI, 1.3-5.4, P < .01). CONCLUSION: Psychological stress in the family may be a contributing factor for childhood obesity. This finding underscores how important it is to give children with obesity and their families psychological and social support in addition to recommendations about changing life style.