Bare fingers,but no obvious influence of “prickly” Velcro! In the absence of parents’ encouragement,it is not clear that “sticky mittens” provide an advantage to the process of learning to reach

In their critique of our mittens study, Needham et al. (2015. Infant Behavior and Development) describe our findings as “surprising.” Further; they suggest that babies in our “sticky mittens” condition may have been discouraged from reaching because, in our study, infants may have touched “prickly” Velcro with their bare fingers. In this response, we present data analyses that do not support the interpretation that finger contact with our Velcroed toy surfaces was associated with poor reaching performance in our “sticky” mittens group. We also clarify that our toys were mainly covered with “non-prickly” Velcro. To explain discrepancies between studies, we restate the original intent of our study and reasons for our methodological modifications. We point to confounds and lack of critical control conditions in the Needham et al. studies, which prevent the making of firm inferences about the effectiveness of the “sticky mittens experience” on the learning to reach process. We also present additional analyses on our “sticky” mittens group showing that the increasing rate of finger touch on the toy leads to greater reaching performance while the rate of toy sticking to the mittens does not. We discuss the importance of sensory-motor experience on the development of learning to reach in infancy and conclude that our results are not surprising.     

Confirmatory reinforcement learning changes with age during adolescence

Understanding how learning changes during human development has been one of the long-standing objectives of developmental science. Recently, advances in computational biology have demonstrated that humans display a bias when learning to navigate novel environments through rewards and punishments: they learn more from outcomes that confirm their expectations than from outcomes that disconfirm them. Here, we ask whether confirmatory learning is stable across development, or whether it might be attenuated in developmental stages in which exploration is beneficial, such as in adolescence. In a reinforcement learning (RL) task, 77 participants aged 11–32 years (four men, mean age = 16.26) attempted to maximize monetary rewards by repeatedly sampling different pairs of novel options, which varied in their reward/punishment probabilities. Mixed-effect models showed an age-related increase in accuracy as long as learning contingencies remained stable across trials, but less so when they reversed halfway through the trials. Age was also associated with a greater tendency to stay with an option that had just delivered a reward, more than to switch away from an option that had just delivered a punishment. At the computational level, a confirmation model provided increasingly better fit with age. This model showed that age differences are captured by decreases in noise or exploration, rather than in the magnitude of the confirmation bias. These findings provide new insights into how learning changes during development and could help better tailor learning environments to people of different ages.

Research Highlights

• Reinforcement learning shows age-related improvement during adolescence, but more in stable learning environments compared with volatile learning environments.
• People tend to stay with an option after a win more than they shift from an option after a loss, and this asymmetry increases with age during adolescence.
• Computationally, these changes are captured by a developing confirmatory learning style, in which people learn more from outcomes that confirm rather than disconfirm their choices.
• Age-related differences in confirmatory learning are explained by decreases in stochasticity, rather than changes in the magnitude of the confirmation bias.

     

A Qualitative Exploration of Counselor Educators' Collaborative Authorship Perceptions and Practices

Limited research exists that examines the ethics of counselor educators' collaborative authorship practices. The study purpose was to explore the collaborative authorship decision-making perceptions and practices of counselor educators (N = 11). We identified six themes: (a) human process and communication, (b) context and nature of relationships, (c) learning experiences about authorship, (d) academic and career stage expectations, (e) collaborative authorship practices, and (f) philosophy of authorship. Implications and recommendations for research are discussed.