The Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised: Factor structure in a culturally and sociodemographically diverse sample in the United States

The recommended factor structure for the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised (IBQ-R), a widely used parent-report measure of infant temperament, has limited empirical support. Moreover, the recommended factors were developed using homogenous samples not representative of current United States (U.S.) sociodemographics. The objective of this study was to examine the factor structure of the IBQ-R in a culturally and sociodemographically diverse U.S. cohort (N = 380 mother-infant dyads). Mothers were assessed during pregnancy on a range of cultural and sociodemographic characteristics and completed the IBQ-R when their infants were 6 months of age. The sample was diverse on maternal marital status, educational attainment, household income, race/ethnicity, primary language spoken, and country of birth. Initial confirmatory factor analysis for the recommended three-factor model yielded a poor fit. Modifications employed in other studies failed to improve model fit. An exploratory factor analysis revealed an acceptable model fit for a three-factor solution that showed similarities to as well as differences from the originally proposed factor structure. Additional analyses suggested lack of invariance on several factor and scale scores by maternal country of birth, race/ethnicity, and household income. The findings suggest that the commonly used IBQ-R factor structure may need to be adjusted for diverse samples and deserves further study.     

Infant sleep-wake behaviors at two weeks,three and six months

Although infant sleep-wake behavior presents several developmental changes during the first six months, literature lacks on reference values and few studies have explored the role of individual change and stability on infant sleep-wake behavior during the first six months. This study aimed (1) to describe infant sleep-wake behaviors during the 24-h period, day and night, at two weeks, three, and six months, (2) and to explore developmental changes and the role of individual change and stability on infant sleep-wake behaviors from two weeks to six months. Ninety-four primiparous mothers completed measures on infant sleep-wake behaviors at two weeks, three and six months. Significant developmental changes were found on infant sleep-wake behaviors from two weeks to six months. Two-week-old infants sleep 13.3 h, spend 8.7 h awake, awake 6.1 times, have 0.4 h of latency to sleep, and 3.2 h of longest sleep period. Three-month-old infants sleep 13.0 h, spend 9.2 h awake, awake 5.5 times, have 0.4 h of latency to sleep, and 5.2 h of longest sleep period. Six-month-old infants sleep 12.2 h, spend 10.0 h awake, awake 5.2 times, have 0.4 h of latency to sleep, and 5.6 h of longest sleep period. Significant individual change and stability were also found on infant sleep-wake behaviors from two weeks to six months. Despite significant developmental and individual changes, individual stability explains a significant amount of the variance on infant sleep-wake behaviors over the first six months of life.     

Goodness of fit between prenatal maternal sleep and infant sleep: Associations with maternal depression and attachment security

The current study prospectively examined the ways in which goodness of fit between maternal and infant sleep contributes to maternal depressive symptoms and the mother-child relationship across the first years of life. In a sample of 173 mother-child dyads, maternal prenatal sleep, infant sleep, maternal depressive symptoms, and mother-child attachment security were assessed via self-report, actigraphy, and observational measures. Results suggested that a poor fit between mothers’ prenatal sleep and infants’ sleep at 8 months (measured by sleep diary and actigraphy) was associated with maternal depressive symptoms at 15 months. Additionally, maternal depression mediated the association between the interplay of mother and infant sleep (measured by sleep diary) and mother-child attachment security at 30 months. Findings emphasize the importance of the match between mother and infant sleep on maternal wellbeing and mother-child relationships and highlight the role of mothers’ perceptions of infant sleep.     

How Information Availability Interacts with Visual Attention during Judgment and Decision Tasks

Decisions in front of a supermarket shelf probably involve a mix of visually available information and associated memories—and interactions between those two. Several cognitive processes, such as decision making, search, and various judgments, are therefore likely to co‐occur, and each process will influence visual attention. We conducted two eye‐tracking experiments capturing parts of these features by having participants make either judgments or decisions concerning products that had been previously encoded. Half the time, participants made their choices with full information about the available products and half the time with crucial task‐relevant information removed. By comparing participants' use of visual attention during decisions and search‐based and memory‐based judgments, we can better understand how visual attention is differently employed between tasks and how it depends on the visual environment. We found that participants' visual attention during decisions is sensitive to evaluations already made during encoding and strongly characterized by preferential looking to the options later to be chosen. When the task environment is rich enough, participants engage in advanced integrative visual behavior and improve their decision quality. In contrast, visual attention during judgments made on the same products reflects a search‐like behavior when all information is available and a more focused type of visual behavior when information is removed. Our findings contribute not only to the literature on how visual attention is used during decision making but also to methodological questions concerning how to measure and identify task‐specific features of visual attention in ecologically valid ways. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temperament and sleep behaviors in infants and toddlers living in low-income homes

Temperament is a dynamic trait that can be shaped by maturity and environmental experiences. In this study, we sought to determine whether and the extent to which temperament was predicted by sleeping behaviors in an understudied sample of primarily Black and White infants and toddlers living in low-income homes (N = 150). Sleeping behaviors were assessed at 15–19 months of age with caregiver report of the Tayside Children’s Sleep Questionnaire. Temperament was examined as effortful control, negativity, and surgency with the Infant Behavior Questionnaire Very Short Form at 9–12 months of age and with the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire Short Form at 20–24 months of age. Covariates were maternal education, household income, and child sex and race. Continuous variables were standardized, then missing data from independent variables were multiply imputed in 20 datasets. Regression analyses showed that about 1 SD improvement in toddler sleep behaviors significantly predicted about 1/5 SD better toddler effortful control. However, sleep behaviors did not significantly predict toddler surgency or negative affect. This study shows that for a sample of infants and toddlers in low-income homes, how a child learns to regulate sleeping behaviors may influence the development of overall effortful control about six months later.     

Influence of breastfeeding and iron status on mental and psychomotor development during the first year of life.

Breastfeeding (BF) confers numerous benefits on the developing infant in both the short and the long term including psychological development, but there are multiple other factors that must be taken into account when these relationships are studied. To analyse how breastfeeding during the first 4 months of life affects infant mental and psychomotor development (MPD) at 6 and 12 months in a group of healthy infants from a Mediterranean Spanish city considering many important potential confounds. This is a longitudinal study conducted on infants from birth until the age of 12 months. A total of 154 healthy infants were evaluated by Paediatric Unit of Sant Joan University Hospital in Reus, Spain. Type of feeding, clinical history, anthropometry, iron status and mental and psychomotor development were assessed and analysed. At 4 months, 24% of infants received BF and 26% received mixed feeding (MF). Multiple Linear Regression models were applied adjusting for potential prenatal, perinatal and postnatal confounds showing that infants who received BF for at least four months presented higher psychomotor development index (PDI) at 6 and at 12 months of age. Also, gestational age and BMI at 6 m were associated positively with PDI at 6 m, and haemoglobin levels at 12 m and birth height were associated with PDI and MDI at 12 m (respectively).In conclusion, after the adjustment of important potential confounds, BF during at least four months and adequate infant iron status are related to better psychomotor development during the first year. No associations were found between BF and mental development.     

Babbling development as seen in canonical babbling ratios: A naturalistic evaluation of all-day recordings

Canonical babbling (CB) is critical in forming foundations for speech. Research has shown that the emergence of CB precedes first words, predicts language outcomes, and is delayed in infants with several communicative disorders. We seek a naturalistic portrayal of CB development, using all-day home recordings to evaluate the influences of age, language, and social circumstances on infant CB production. Thus we address the nature of very early language foundations and how they can be modulated. This is the first study to evaluate possible interactions of language and social circumstance in the development of babbling. We examined the effects of age (6 and 11 months), language/culture (English and Chinese), and social circumstances (during infant-directed speech [IDS], during infant overhearing of adult-directed speech [ADS], or when infants were alone) on canonical babbling ratios (CBR = canonical syllables/total syllables). The results showed a three-way interaction of infant age by infant language/culture by social circumstance. The complexity of the results forces us to recognize that a variety of factors can interact in the development of foundations for language, and that both the infant vocal response to the language/culture environment and the language/culture environment of the infant may change across age.     

Mimicking emotions: how 3–12-month-old infants use the facial expressions and eyes of a model

While there is an extensive literature on the tendency to mimic emotional expressions in adults, it is unclear how this skill emerges and develops over time. Specifically, it is unclear whether infants mimic discrete emotion-related facial actions, whether their facial displays are moderated by contextual cues and whether infants’ emotional mimicry is constrained by developmental changes in the ability to discriminate emotions. We therefore investigate these questions using Baby-FACS to code infants’ facial displays and eye-movement tracking to examine infants’ looking times at facial expressions. Three-, 7-, and 12-month-old participants were exposed to dynamic facial expressions (joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness) of a virtual model which either looked at the infant or had an averted gaze. Infants did not match emotion-specific facial actions shown by the model, but they produced valence-congruent facial responses to the distinct expressions. Furthermore, only the 7- and 12-month-olds displayed negative responses to the model’s negative expressions and they looked more at areas of the face recruiting facial actions involved in specific expressions. Our results suggest that valence-congruent expressions emerge in infancy during a period where the decoding of facial expressions becomes increasingly sensitive to the social signal value of emotions.     

Autonomy in Action: Linking the Act of Looking to Memory Formation in Infancy via Dynamic Neural Fields

Looking is a fundamental exploratory behavior by which infants acquire knowledge about the world. In theories of infant habituation, however, looking as an exploratory behavior has been deemphasized relative to the reliable nature with which looking indexes active cognitive processing. We present a new theory that connects looking to the dynamics of memory formation and formally implement this theory in a Dynamic Neural Field model that learns autonomously as it actively looks and looks away from a stimulus. We situate this model in a habituation task and illustrate the mechanisms by which looking, encoding, working memory formation, and long‐term memory formation give rise to habituation across multiple stimulus and task contexts. We also illustrate how the act of looking and the temporal dynamics of learning affect each other. Finally, we test a new hypothesis about the sources of developmental differences in looking.