Learning to walk changes infants’ social interactions

The onset of crawling marks a motor, cognitive and social milestone. The present study investigated whether independent walking marks a second milestone for social behaviors. In Experiment 1, the social and exploratory behaviors of crawling infants were observed while crawling and in a baby-walker, resulting in no differences based on posture. In Experiment 2, the social behaviors of independently walking infants were compared to age-matched crawling infants in a baby-walker. Independently walking infants spent significantly more time interacting with the toys and with their mothers, and also made more vocalizations and more directed gestures compared to infants in the walker. Experiment 3 tracked infants’ social behaviors longitudinally across the transition from crawling and walking. Even when controlled for age, the transition to independent walking marked increased interaction time with mothers, as well as more sophisticated interactions, including directing mothers’ attention to particular objects. The results suggest a developmental progression linking social interactions with milestones in locomotor development.     

Triadic interactions support infants’ emerging understanding of intentional actions

Infants’ understanding of the intentional nature of human action develops gradually across the first year of life. A key question is what mechanisms drive changes in this foundational social‐cognitive ability. The current studies explored the hypothesis that triadic interactions in which infants coordinate attention between a social partner and an object of mutual interest promote infants’ developing understanding of others as intentional agents. Infants’ spontaneous tendency to participate in triadic engagement was assessed in a semi‐structured play session with a researcher. Intentional action understanding was assessed by evaluating infants’ ability to visually predict the goal of an intentional reaching action. Study 1 (N = 88) revealed that 8‐ to 9‐month‐olds who displayed more bouts of triadic engagement showed better concurrent reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action. Study 2 (N = 114) confirmed these findings using a longitudinal design and demonstrated that infants who displayed more bouts of triadic engagement at 6–7 months were better at prospectively reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action 3 months later. Cross‐lagged path analyses revealed that intentional action understanding at 6–7 months did not predict later triadic engagement, suggesting that early triadic engagement supports later intentional action processing and not the other way around. Finally, evidence from both studies revealed the unique contribution of triadic over dyadic forms of engagement. These results highlight the importance of social interaction as a developmental mechanism and suggest that infants enrich their understanding of intentionality through triadic interactions with social partners.     

A study of reaching actions in walking infants

Acquiring motor skills transforms the perceptual and cognitive world of infants and expands their exploratory engagement with objects. This study investigated how reaching is integrated with walking among infant walkers (n = 23, 14.5–15.5 months). In a walk-to-reach paradigm, diverse object retrieval strategies were observed. All infants were willing to use their upper and lower bodies in concert, and the timing of this coordination reflected features of their environment. Infants with an older walking age (months since walking onset) retrieved items more rapidly and exploited their non-reaching hand more effectively during object retrieval than did same-age infants with a younger walking age. This suggests that the actions of the upper- and lower-body are flexibly integrated and that this integration may change across development. Mechanisms that shape sophisticated upper-body use during upright object retrieval are discussed. Infants flexibly integrate emerging motor skills in the service of object retrieval in ways not previously documented.     

Embodied communication: Speakers’ gestures affect listeners’ actions

We explored how speakers and listeners use hand gestures as a source of perceptual-motor information during naturalistic communication. After solving the Tower of Hanoi task either with real objects or on a computer, speakers explained the task to listeners. Speakers’ hand gestures, but not their speech, reflected properties of the particular objects and the actions that they had previously used to solve the task. Speakers who solved the problem with real objects used more grasping handshapes and produced more curved trajectories during the explanation. Listeners who observed explanations from speakers who had previously solved the problem with real objects subsequently treated computer objects more like real objects; their mouse trajectories revealed that they lifted the objects in conjunction with moving them sideways, and this behavior was related to the particular gestures that were observed. These findings demonstrate that hand gestures are a reliable source of perceptual-motor information during human communication.     

Processing deceptive information in sports: Individual differences for responding to head fakes depends on the attentional capability of the observer

In team sports, players sometimes try to deceive their opponents by providing misleading information in order to gain a temporal advantage. Head-fakes are often applied when a player gazes in one direction, while passing/shooting the ball in another direction. The opponent is challenged to focus attention on the relevant information (i.e., pass direction), while ignoring the conflicting information (i.e., gaze direction). The present study aimed to identify the link between attentional capabilities and the effectiveness of head fakes. Twenty-seven novices performed in a basketball-specific head-fake task and in the attention-window task. A correlation between performances in both tasks revealed that participants with higher attentional capabilities were better able to focus their attention on the relevant feature (pass direction), when judging basketball situations, than participants with lower attentional capabilities. The results emphasize the relevance of high attentional capabilities in team sports and indicate that focusing one’s attention to the pass direction poses a possibility of reducing the effects of head fakes.     

Developmental stimulation in child care centers contributes to young infants’ cognitive development

This study examined whether the quality of caregiver behavior in child care centers contributes to infant cognitive development at 9 months of age. Sixty-four infants (34 boys) were observed with their primary caregivers in child care centers at 3, 6, and 9 months of age. Caregiver behavior was rated for sensitivity and for stimulation of infant development during one-to-one caregiving interactions. Infant cognitive development was assessed using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development-II (Mental Development Index). Higher levels of developmental stimulation in the centers predicted higher levels of infant cognitive development at 9 months, beyond infant cognitive development at 3 months (just before entering child care), parental education, and maternal sensitivity. The results suggest that even small increases in developmental stimulation provided in child care centers in the first year of life may foster infants’ cognitive development.     

Changes in children’s perception-action tuning over short time scales: Bicycling across traffic-filled intersections in a virtual environment

This investigation examined short-term changes in child and adult cyclists’ gap decisions and movement timing in response to general and specific road-crossing experiences. Children (10- and 12-year-olds) and adults rode a bicycle through a virtual environment with 12 intersections. Participants faced continuous cross traffic and waited for gaps they judged were adequate for crossing. In the control condition, participants encountered randomly ordered gaps ranging from 1.5 to 5.0 s at all intersections. In the high-density condition, participants encountered high-density intersections sandwiched between sets of control intersections. These high-density intersections were designed to push participants toward taking tighter gaps. Participants in both conditions were more likely to accept 3.5-, 4.0-, 4.5-, and 5.0-s gaps at the last set of intersections than at the first set of intersections, whereas participants in the high-density condition were also more likely to accept very tight 3.0-s gaps at the last intersections than at the first intersections. Moreover, individuals in the high-density condition who waited less and took shorter gaps at the middle intersections were also more likely to take very tight 3.0-s gaps at the last intersections. The 10-year-olds in both conditions had more time to spare when they cleared the path of the oncoming car at the last intersections, whereas the 12-year-olds and adults showed no change in time to spare across intersections. The discussion focuses on linking short-term change in perceptual-motor functioning to longer term perceptual-motor development.     

Fast mapping of multiple words: Insights into when “the information provided” does and does not equal “the information perceived”

A candidate process for explaining the rapid vocabulary acquisition during the preschool years is “fast mapping,” children's ability to sketch partial maps of a word's meaning after brief exposure. The present study examines this process for learning multiple words, testing the hypothesis that children's attention to the information critical for quickly mapping multiple words onto their referents depends on the alternatives available when the words are introduced. Fifty-eight 40-month-old children participated in one of two conditions. In both conditions, each trial for novel Word #1 presented a novel object and three familiar ones. The conditions differed in the object choices presented when novel Word #2 was introduced. Although the same information was available to children in both conditions, younger children showed significantly better learning of the new words in the successive condition than in the concurrent condition. Implications of this for age-related differences and for teaching strategies are discussed.     

The role of words and sounds in infants' visual processing: from overshadowing to attentional tuning

Although it is well documented that language plays an important role in cognitive development, there are different views concerning the mechanisms underlying these effects. Some argue that even early in development, effects of words stem from top-down knowledge, whereas others argue that these effects stem from auditory input affecting attention allocated to visual input. Previous research (e.g., Robinson & Sloutsky, 2004a ) demonstrated that non-speech sounds attenuate processing of corresponding visual input at 8, 12, and 16 months of age, whereas the current study demonstrates that words attenuate visual processing at 10 months but not at 16 months (Experiment 1). Furthermore, prefamiliarization with non-speech sounds (Experiment 2) resulted in able processing of visual input by 16-month-olds. These findings suggest that some effects of labels found early in development may stem from familiarity with human speech. The possibility of general-auditory factors underlying the effects of words on cognitive development is discussed.     

Gesture offers insight into problem‐solving in adults and children

When asked to explain their solutions to a problem, both adults and children gesture as they talk. These gestures at times convey information that is not conveyed in speech and thus reveal thoughts that are distinct from those revealed in speech. In this study, we use the classic Tower of Hanoi puzzle to validate the claim that gesture and speech taken together can reflect the activation of two cognitive strategies within a single response. The Tower of Hanoi is a well‐studied puzzle, known to be most efficiently solved by activating subroutines at theoretically defined choice points. When asked to explain how they solved the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, both adults and children produced significantly more gesture‐speech mismatches—explanations in which speech conveyed one path and gesture another—at these theoretically defined choice points than they produced at non‐choice points. Even when the participants did not solve the problem efficiently, gesture could be used to indicate where the participants were deciding between alternative paths. Gesture can, thus, serve as a useful adjunct to speech when attempting to discover cognitive processes in problem‐solving.     

10‐month‐old infants’ inference of invisible agent: Distinction in causality between object motion and human action1

Abstract: Two habituation experiments investigated 10‐month‐old infants’ interpretation of events where a stationary object began to move without any visible causes. During habituation, infants saw that an object partly hidden by an occluder began to move away from the occluder. Then, they were tested with three test events without the occluder: the ?rst event showed a hand pushing the object, the second event showed a hand failing to touch the object, and the last event had no agent. The objects were a ball in Experiment 1, and a person in Experiment 2. The test event that the infants looked at for the shortest duration in Experiment 1 was where the hand pushed the ball, whereas they looked at the three test events almost equal amounts of time in Experiment 2. These results indicate that 10‐month‐old infants responded to the events in terms of causality and could infer the presence of the agent behind the occluder only when they saw the habituation event featuring the ball.     

Attending to what matters: Flexibility in adults’ and infants’ action perception

Action perception is selective in that observers attend to and encode certain dimensions of action over others. But how flexible is action perception in its selection of perceptual information? One possibility is that observers consistently attend to particular dimensions of action over others across different contexts. Another possibility, tested here, is that observers flexibly vary their attention to different dimensions of action based on the context in which action occurs. We investigated 9.5-month-old infants’ and adults’ ability to attend to drop height under varying contexts—aiming to drop an object into a narrow container versus a wide container. We predicted differential attention to increases in aiming height for the narrow container versus the wide container because an increase in aiming height has a differential effect on success (i.e., getting the object into the container) depending on the width of the container. Both adults and infants showed an asymmetry in their attention to aiming height as a function of context; in the wide container condition increases and decreases in aiming height were equally detectable, whereas in the narrow container condition observers more readily discriminated increases over decreases in aiming height. These results indicate that action perception is both selective and flexible according to context, aiding in action prediction and infants’ social–cognitive development more broadly.     

Children’s scale errors are a natural consequence of learning to associate objects with actions: A computational model

Young children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size—they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children's action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional bias. We used computational modelling to emulate children's learning to associate objects with actions and to select appropriate actions, given object shape and size. A computational Developmental Deep Model of Action and Naming (DDMAN) was built on the dual‐route theory of action selection, in which actions on objects are selected via a direct (nonsemantic or visual) route or an indirect (semantic) route. As in case of children, DDMAN produced scale errors: the number of errors was high at the beginning of training and decreased linearly but did not disappear completely. Inspection of emerging object–action associations revealed that these were coarsely organized by shape, hence leading DDMAN to initially select actions based on shape rather than size. With experience, DDMAN gradually learned to use size in addition to shape when selecting actions. Overall, our simulations demonstrate that children's scale errors are a natural consequence of learning to associate objects with actions.     

Ups and Downs in Auditory Development: Preschoolers’ Sensitivity to Pitch Contour and Timbre

Much research has explored developing sound representations in language, but less work addresses developing representations of other sound patterns. This study examined preschool children's musical representations using two different tasks: discrimination and sound–picture association. Melodic contour—a musically relevant property—and instrumental timbre, which is (arguably) less musically relevant, were tested. In Experiment 1, children failed to associate cartoon characters to melodies with maximally different pitch contours, with no advantage for melody preexposure. Experiment 2 also used different‐contour melodies and found good discrimination, whereas association was at chance. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2, but with a large timbre change instead of a contour change. Here, discrimination and association were both excellent. Preschool‐aged children may have stronger or more durable representations of timbre than contour, particularly in more difficult tasks. Reasons for weaker association of contour than timbre information are discussed, along with implications for auditory development.     

Infants’ responsiveness to pictorial depth cues in preferential-reaching studies: A meta-analysis

The findings of numerous preferential-reaching studies suggest that infants first respond to pictorial depth cues between 5 and 7 months of age. However, three recent preferential-reaching studies have found evidence of responsiveness to pictorial depth cues in 5-month-olds. We investigated these apparently contradictory results by conducting meta-analyses of the data from 5-month-olds who participated in preferential-reaching studies. The data from 16 samples, comprising 475 infants 5–5.5 months of age, were integrated. The results showed that the infants responded more consistently to depth relationships specified by pictorial cues under monocular than under binocular viewing conditions (p < .001), indicating that 5-month-old infants respond to pictorial depth cues. This effect remained significant (p < .001) when the individual experiments that had found significant results were omitted from the analysis. Although the majority of experiments were unable to find evidence of pictorial depth perception individually, this ability was clearly revealed when their results were combined.     

Finer Distinctions: Variability in Satisfied Older Couples’ Problem‐Solving Behaviors

This study utilized observational and self‐report data from 64 maritally satisfied and stable older couples to explore if there were meaningful differences in how couples approached marital disagreements. Using a typology approach to classify couples based on their behaviors in a 15‐minute problem‐solving interaction, findings revealed four types of couples: (1) problem solvers (characterized by both spouses’ higher problem‐solving skills and warmth), (2) supporters (characterized by both spouses’ notable warmth), (3) even couples (characterized by both spouses’ moderate problem‐solving skills and warmth), and (4) cool couples (characterized by both spouses’ greater negativity and lower problem‐solving skills and warmth). Despite the differences in these behaviors, all couples had relatively high marital satisfaction and functioning. However, across nearly all indices, spouses in the cool couple cluster reported poorer marital functioning, particularly when compared to the problem solvers and supporters. These findings suggest that even modest doses of negativity (e.g., eye roll) may be problematic for some satisfied couples later in life. The implications of these typologies are discussed as they pertain to practitioners’ efforts to tailor their approaches to a wider swath of the population.     

The ‘too muchness’ of excitement: Sexuality in light of excess,attachment and affect regulation

This paper brings together contemporary thinking about early attachment and affect regulation with our clinical and theoretical understanding of the problems of adult sexuality. In addition to recent theories of affect regulation and attachment, we incorporate Laplanche's idea of ‘excess’, which was an important transitional concept integrating real experience with fantasy in sexuality. We elaborate the idea of excess –‐ ‘too‐muchness’ –‐ to illuminate the early overwhelming of the psyche that affects the formation of sexuality. Linked to recent theoretical developments, this idea helps to grasp the relationship between sexual excitement and early affect regulation, showing how excitement becomes dangerous, thus impeding or distorting desire. The ‘too‐muchness’ of excitement recalls the experience of being a stimulated, overwhelmed, unsoothed child and influences later inability to tolerate sexual arousal and the excitement affect. A clinical case illustrates this connection between attachment trauma, anxiety about sexuality, as well as shameful experiences of gender identity as an area of trauma. We emphasize the importance of working through the terrors and desires of the mother–baby relationship as they emerge in the transference–countertransference in order to develop the ability to hold excitement and stimulation without experiencing the too‐much as the intolerable. This includes the working‐through of ruptures related to overstimulation as well as the delicate balance of attention to fantasy and intersubjective work in the transference.     

Enhancing the language development of toddlers in foster care by promoting foster parents’ sensitivity: Results from a randomized controlled trial

Young children in foster care are at increased risk for problematic language development, making early intervention a critical tool in enhancing these children's foundational language abilities. This study examined the efficacy of an early preventative intervention, Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch‐up for Toddlers (ABC‐T), in improving the receptive vocabulary abilities of toddlers placed in foster care. All the children had been removed from their biological parents’ care and placed into foster care. When children were between 24 and 36 months old, foster parents were contacted by research staff and consented to participate. Parents were randomly assigned using a random number generator to receive either ABC‐T (n = 45), which aimed to promote sensitive parenting for children who have experienced early adversity, or a control intervention (n = 43). Foster children's receptive vocabulary skills were assessed post‐intervention using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition, when children were between 36 and 60 months old. Children whose foster parents received ABC‐T demonstrated more advanced receptive vocabulary abilities than children whose foster parents received the control intervention. The positive effect of ABC‐T on foster children's receptive vocabulary was mediated by increases in foster parents’ sensitivity during parent–child interactions. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01261806.