Synapses,Schizophrenia, and Civilization: What Made Homo Sapient?

Progress in technology has allowed dynamic research on the development of the human brain that has revolutionized concepts. Particularly, the notions of plasticity, neuronal selection, and the effects of afferent stimuli have entered into thinking about brain development. Here I focus on development from the age of four years to early adulthood, during which a 30 percent reduction in some brain synapses occurs that is out of proportion to changes in neuronal numbers. This corresponds temporally with changes in normal child behavior from the loose‐associative, almost schizoid, thinking and art of the four‐year‐old to the more trained, or disciplined, or acculturated—and restrained—personality of the young adult. I propose that the synaptic changes can best be thought of as a winnowing process likely subject to environmental influences. Acquisition of language and the ability to link linguistic cognition to the plastic development of the brain provide a potentially powerful means of explaining the evolutionally explosive development of human cognition and culture. Schizophrenia, a disease that can be envisioned as representing a derangement of synaptic maturation, may provide an entry into the search for genes controlling the processes mediating the unprecedented development of Homo sapiens over the past 40,000 to 70,000 years. The recently completed mapping of the genome of the chimpanzee provides a new frame of reference that may speed the search.     

Factors associated with the socioemotional development of preterm infants

Preterm birth is a risk factor for problems in interactions with others. We compared the difference in socioemotional development between hospital discharge and at six months of corrected age of infants born ≤32 weeks and assessed the impact of maternal and infantile factors on socioemotional development rate within a 6 month’s period. Mother-child dyads (n = 144) were assessed by the Mother-Baby Observation Protocol 0–6 months through a video microanalysis. Multivariate model was built. Neonatal, maternal and child factors were associated with interactive gaze, initiate contact, responsiveness, infantile vocalization, and thus contributed to the socioemocional development of preterm infants with their mothers.     

A time series analysis of the relation between motor skill acquisition and sleep in infancy

To systematically examine the relation between motor milestone onset and disruption of night sleep in infancy, three families kept microgenetic, prospective, daily checklist diaries of their infants’ motor behavior and sleep (197-313 observation days; 19,000 diary entries). Process control and interrupted time series analyses examined whether deviations from the moving average for night wakings and evening sleep duration were temporally linked to motor skill onset and tested for meaningful differences in individual sleep patterns before and after skill onset. Model assumptions defined skill onset as first day of occurrence or as mastery and moving average windows as 3, 7, or 14 days. Changes in infants’ sleep patterns were associated with changing expertise for motor milestones. The temporal relation varied depending on infant and sleep parameter. Intensive longitudinal data collection may increase our understanding of micro-events in infant development.     

Tapping into the interplay of lexical and number knowledge using fast mapping: A longitudinal eye-tracking study with two-year-olds

Language skills and mathematical competencies are argued to influence each other during development. While a relation between the development of vocabulary size and mathematical skills is already documented in the literature, this study further examines how children’s ability to map a novel word to an unknown object as well as their ability to retain this word from memory may be related to their knowledge of number words. Twenty-five children were tested longitudinally (at 30 and at 36 months of age) using an eye-tracking-based fast mapping task, the Give-a-Number task, and standardized measures of vocabulary. The results reveal that children’s ability to create and retain a mental representation of a novel word was related to number knowledge at 30 months, but not at 36 months while vocabulary size correlated with number knowledge only at 36 months. These results show that even specific mapping processes are initially related to the acquisition of number words and they speak for a parallelism between the development of lexical and number-concept knowledge despite their semantic and syntactic differences.     

The Persistence of Priming: Exploring Long-lasting Syntactic Priming Effects in Children and Adults

The implicit learning account of syntactic priming proposes that the same mechanism underlies syntactic priming and language development, providing a link between a child and adult language processing. The present experiment tested predictions of this account by comparing the persistence of syntactic priming effects in children and adults. Four-year-olds and adults first described transitive events after hearing transitive primes, constituting an exposure phase that established priming effects for passives. The persistence of this priming effect was measured in a test phase as participants described further transitive events but no longer heard primes. Their production of passives was compared to a baseline group who described the same pictures without any exposure to primes. Neither immediate nor long-term priming effects differed between children and adults but both children and adults showed significant immediate and persistent effects of the priming when the test phase occurred immediately after the exposure phase and when a short delay separated the exposure and test phase. The implications of these results for an implicit learning account of syntactic priming are discussed.     

Dynamics Versus Development in Numerosity Estimation: A Computational Model Accurately Predicts a Developmental Reversal

Perceptual judgments result from a dynamic process, but little is known about the dynamics of number-line estimation. A recent study proposed a computational model that combined a model of trial-to-trial changes with a model for the internal scaling of discrete numbers. Here, we tested a surprising prediction of the model—a situation in which children's estimates of numerosity would be better than those of adults. Consistent with the model simulations, task contexts led to a clear developmental reversal: children made more adult-like, linear estimates when to-be-estimated numbers were descending over trials (i.e., backward condition), whereas adults became more like children with logarithmic estimates when numbers were ascending (i.e., forward condition). In addition, adults’ estimates were subject to inter-trial differences regardless of stimulus order. In contrast, children were not able to use the trial-to-trial dynamics unless stimuli varied systematically, indicating the limited cognitive capacity for dynamic updates. Together, the model adequately predicts both developmental and trial-to-trial changes in number-line tasks.     

Processus d’élaboration et de validation d’un questionnaire portant sur le développement des compétences émotionnelles lors du mentorat

Objective and methodThe aim of this article is to provide a portrait of the emotional competencies developed by school principals (n = 359) in a mentoring context by developing a seven-step questionnaire by Frenette et al. (2019) presenting various proofs of validity.ResultsThe analyses conducted support a factorial structure with two correlated aspects of emotional competencies (self and others). School principals in Quebec develop more emotional competencies related to the aspect of others than for themselves during mentoring. A further analysis indicates that school principals develop more two dimensions of Emotional competencies: Identification and Understanding. The results also show that 77.26 % of respondents indicated that they developed emotional skills during mentoring.ConclusionThe results provided an understanding of the importance of emotional competencies in education, and specifically in school management. It also revealed the importance of emphasizing the role of mentoring in their development. To our knowledge, the questionnaire developed in this study is one of the first to measure the development of emotional competencies during a mentoring relationship.     

Bridging ears and eyes when learning spoken words: On the effects of bilingual experience at 30 months

From the very first moments of their lives, infants selectively attend to the visible orofacial movements of their social partners and apply their exquisite speech perception skills to the service of lexical learning. Here we explore how early bilingual experience modulates children's ability to use visible speech as they form new lexical representations. Using a cross‐modal word‐learning task, bilingual children aged 30 months were tested on their ability to learn new lexical mappings in either the auditory or the visual modality. Lexical recognition was assessed either in the same modality as the one used at learning (‘same modality’ condition: auditory test after auditory learning, visual test after visual learning) or in the other modality (‘cross‐modality’ condition: visual test after auditory learning, auditory test after visual learning). The results revealed that like their monolingual peers, bilingual children successfully learn new words in either the auditory or the visual modality and show cross‐modal recognition of words following auditory learning. Interestingly, as opposed to monolinguals, they also demonstrate cross‐modal recognition of words upon visual learning. Collectively, these findings indicate a bilingual edge in visual word learning, expressed in the capacity to form a recoverable cross‐modal representation of visually learned words.