Tap,swipe, and build: Parental spatial input during iPad® and toy play

Despite the increase in the use of interactive technological devices, little is known about the impact that play context has on the production of spatial language by parents. To investigate whether there is differential parental spatial input afforded by play contexts with their preschoolers, 34 children (20 girls, 14 boys) and their primary caregivers engaged in 30‐min 3‐dimensional (3D) spatial play using blocks and puzzles and virtual 2‐dimensional (2D) spatial play using an iPad^® in 2 separate home visits. There were no significant differences in the average amount of spatial talk and the number of spatial categories used by parents in both 3D and 2D play contexts. However, the amount of parental spatial talk decreased significantly with older preschoolers using the iPad^®. In the 3D play contexts, parents produced more words related to spatial dimensions, location and directions, and continuous amount than in the 2D play contexts. However, in the 2D play contexts, they produced more words associated with orientations and transformations as well as deictics than in the 3D play contexts. Our findings suggest that technology can be effectively introduced into play contexts to elicit enriched parental spatial input by supporting parents and caregivers with best practices.

Highlights

• The present study examines the differences in parental spatial talk when using traditional versus technology‐based learning tools with their preschoolers.
• Two 30‐min home observations of parent–child dyads playing blocks and puzzles versus spatial apps on an iPad^®. No significant differences in the amount of parental spatial talk and the number of spatial categories in both play contexts were found.
• Our findings suggest that technology can be effectively introduced into play contexts to elicit enriched parental spatial input.

     

Am I ‘Chinese’ or ‘Scottish’? children’s perceptions of the adaptive nature of Chinese Scottish children’s dual identities

Chinese Scottish children (children who are born and live in Scotland with Chinese parents) face challenges in establishing their identity. However, there is lack of research that investigates ethnic minority Chinese children’s identity and associated feelings about the dual social context in which they live. The study introduced a social identity vignettes task to examine Chinese Scottish and White Scottish children’s perceptions of Chinese ethnic identity and Scottish national identity of a Scottish born Chinese character within two contrasting socio-cultural contexts (Scottish vs. Chinese). This study examines whether children’s ethnic and national identity and feelings of positivity are adaptive and sensitive to social context. In addition it explored age-related changes in perceptions of ethnic and national identification in the vignettes. The sample comprised of 161 children (8, 11, and 14 years). The results found Chinese Scottish children and White Scottish children’s judgments of the characters’ ethnic identity changed with the cultural context. Both groups of children had a similar perception of vignette characters’ feeling of positivity. Both Chinese and White Scottish children judged that the character would feel more positive about him/herself in the Chinese context. There was no main effect of age.     

Statistical learning in typically developing children: the role of age and speed of stimulus presentation

It is possible that statistical learning (SL) plays a role in almost every mental activity. Indeed, research on SL has grown rapidly over recent decades in an effort to better understand perception and cognition. Yet, there remain gaps in our understanding of how SL operates, in particular with regard to its (im)mutability. Here, we investigated whether participant-related variables (such as age) and task-related variables (such as speed of stimulus presentation) affect visual statistical learning (VSL) in typically developing children. We tested 183 participants ranging in age from 5 to 12 years and compared three speeds of presentation (using stimulus durations of 800, 400 and 200 msecs). A multiple regression analysis revealed significant effects of both age and speed of presentation - after attention during familiarization and gender had been taken into consideration. VSL followed a developmental trajectory whereby learning increased with age. The amount of learning increased with longer presentation times (as shown by Turk-Browne, Jungé & Scholl, 2005, in their study of adults). There was no significant interaction between the two variables. These findings assist in elucidating the nature of statistical learning itself. While statistical learning can be observed in very young children and at remarkably fast presentation times, participant- and task-related variables do impact upon this type of learning. The findings reported here may serve to enhance our understanding of individual differences in the cognitive and perceptual processes that are thought to rely, at least in part, on SL (e.g. language processing and object recognition).     

Multicultural Women's Experience of Household Labor, Conflicts, and Equity

This study examines a group of 419 multicultural women (64 African Americans, 136 Asian Americans, 171 Hispanic Americans, and 48 Middle Eastern Americans) from Southern California. It examines Chafetz's thesis that women with macrolevel power (high socioeconomic status, SES) will show higher levels of conflict with their spouses over household labor. Such conflict is expected to relate to dissatisfaction with the division of household labor as well as time or task differences with spouses over housework. The multicultural women in this study differed among themselves by SES (proportional income, job status, and education) as well as by the household time and tasks with their spouses, but such factors did not influence conflict. Results indicate that regardless of ethnicity or macrolevel power, multicultural women who perform more household tasks than other women are more dissatisfied with the division of labor. These variables alone influence the number of conflicts per week reported by racial and ethnic couples. When reasons for conflict are compared, the equity issue of unfair share is cited more frequently than any others. In general, comparisons with one's spouse on traditional woman's tasks and time on women's work are not salient to the experience of household labor conflicts among multicultural women even when macrolevel power is attained. The majority of our respondents earn 39% of the household income and work for pay 30 hr/week, yet perform the majority of necessary household labor. The proportional income and overall education levels of this sample are similar to Census Bureau statistics for their respective U.S. groups in 1995–1996.     

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: self-esteem differences in the experience and anticipation of success

Successes--defined broadly as meeting important standards or receiving positive evaluations--are widely assumed to be enjoyed equally by people with high self-esteem (HSEs) and low self-esteem (LSEs). Three studies examined the contradictory hypothesis that HSEs react more favorably to success than do LSEs and that success brings about certain unfavorable consequences for LSEs. Undergraduate participants reacted to a laboratory-manipulated success (Studies 1 and 2) or imagined highly positive events in the future (Study 3). Self-esteem differences emerged in anxiety, thoughts about the self, and (in Study 3) thoughts about non-self-related aspects of the event. LSEs were more anxious than HSEs after succeeding, success improved HSEs' self-relevant thoughts but not LSEs', and LSEs focused more on success's negative aspects.     

Responses to interpersonal transgressions in families: forgivingness, forgivability, and relationship-specific effects

Social relations analyses examined the relative importance of forgivingness (disposition to forgive others), forgivability (tendency to obtain forgiveness from others), and relationship effects in determining family members' transgression-related interpersonal motivations (TRIMs) and their perceptions of others' TRIMs toward them (PTRIMs). In 2 studies, the individual and dyadic predictors of these components and their relative importance differed by family role (father, mother, or early adolescent child). Dispositional tendencies accounted for the most variance in father and child forgiveness, whereas mothers' TRIMs and PTRIMs were more strongly determined by relationship and partner effects. Personality correlates of forgivingness and forgivability were moderated by family role. The findings point to the need to embed the study of forgiveness in more complex psychosocial contexts. The theoretical, methodological, and applied implications of this conclusion are discussed.     

The input to verb learning in Mandarin Chinese: a role for syntactic bootstrapping

The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in multiple frames? Over 6,000 child-directed utterances were parsed. Analyses revealed that transitive verbs, motion verbs, and internal/communication verbs were distinguished syntactically; moreover, the 60 target verbs were used in multiple sentence frames. These findings support a role for syntactic bootstrapping in Mandarin verb learning.     

Do dogs (Canis familiaris) understand invisible displacement?

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) perform above chance on invisible displacement tasks despite showing few other signs of possessing the necessary representational abilities. Four experiments investigated how dogs find an object that has been hidden in 1 of 3 opaque boxes. Dogs passed the task under a variety of control conditions, but only if the device used to displace the object ended up adjacent to the target box after the displacement. These results suggest that the search behavior of dogs was guided by simple associative rules rather than mental representation of the object's past trajectory. In contrast, Experiment 5 found that on the same task, 18- and 24-month-old children showed no disparity between trials in which the displacement device was adjacent or nonadjacent to the target box.