Infancy最新文献

{"title":"Infants' Visual Preference for Upright Faces During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan","authors":"Nobu Shirai,&nbsp;Mizuki Kawai,&nbsp;Yumiko Otsuka,&nbsp;Megumi Kobayashi,&nbsp;Tsunehiko Tanaka","doi":"10.1111/infa.70052","DOIUrl":"10.1111/infa.70052","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic required face masks to be worn in public spaces, changing daily face-to-face communication. This study investigated whether infants perceived masked faces as faces during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when wearing masks in public was nearly universal in Japan. Between July 2021 and November 2022, we conducted an experiment using a novel remote method to examine infants' preferences for upright versus inverted faces under both masked and unmasked conditions. Overall, infants aged 4–5 months and 7–8 months (<i>n</i> = 32 in each age group) preferred upright to inverted faces in both conditions. These results suggest that Japanese infants born during the COVID-19 pandemic could recognize masked faces as faces. Furthermore, across both age groups, the preference was more pronounced in the masked-face condition than in the unmasked-face condition. These results possibly reflect the fact that infants had relatively frequent exposure to masked faces during the pandemic.</p>","PeriodicalId":47895,"journal":{"name":"Infancy","volume":"30 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12630442/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145558269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Caregiver Holding, Not Vocalizing, Supports Real-Time Vagal Regulation","authors":"Megan Micheletti,&nbsp;Anna Madden-Rusnak,&nbsp;Kaya de Barbaro","doi":"10.1111/infa.70054","DOIUrl":"10.1111/infa.70054","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Caregivers play a critical role in infant physiological regulation. Lab-based studies show that more responsive mothers have infants that are better regulators, indexed by a decrease in infant respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) during standardized stressors. However, little is known about the specific caregiving behaviors that lead to physiological regulation. This study leverages wearable sensors and ecologically valid observations of mother and infant behavior to identify how spontaneous caregiving behaviors influence real-time mother and infant parasympathetic regulation following infant distress. <i>N</i> = 41 mother-infant dyads (mean age 4.6 months) were recruited from an urban North American city. Infants and mothers wore ECG monitors while being video recorded participating in daily routines around their home for 1 hour. Trained RAs annotated infant crying and mothers' regulation behaviors, including holding and speaking to their infant. Contrary to laboratory findings, mothers did not respond immediately to their infant's crying in ecologically valid home interactions, with most response latencies around 10 s and some up to 2–3 min. Additionally, not all caregiving behaviors had effects on real-time physiological regulation. Mothers holding their infant, but not vocalizing, produced significant time-locked decreases in real-time mother and infant RSA, corresponding to regulation. Physical touch, but not vocalizations, may scaffold mother and infant physiological regulation in the context of unprompted infant distress. Specific caregiving behaviors actively shape in-the-moment physiological arousal and regulation “in the wild.”</p>","PeriodicalId":47895,"journal":{"name":"Infancy","volume":"30 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12627269/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145551448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deferred Imitation: A 9-Month Revolution or an Emerging Ability at 6 Months?","authors":"Sofie A. Beyer,&nbsp;Trine Sonne,&nbsp;Osman S. Kingo,&nbsp;Peter Krøjgaard","doi":"10.1111/infa.70053","DOIUrl":"10.1111/infa.70053","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The ability to engage in deferred imitation is by many scholars considered as one of several social-cognitive abilities that emerge during what has been coined the “9-month revolution”. Meanwhile, evidence from several studies predominantly using a deferred imitation task with a hand-held puppet has shown that an emerging ability may be present already from 6 months of age. In the present study, this enigma was addressed by investigating the ability to engage in deferred imitation using five different objects, including the puppet, in 6-, 8-, 10-, and 12-month-old infants (<i>N</i> = 200). The results showed that, at group level, infants in all age groups succeeded in deferred imitation tasks with different objects after a 24-h delay. As expected, older infants imitated more of the demonstrated actions compared to younger infants. These findings add to the understanding of the early development of deferred imitation in infancy and point to important developmental changes during the second part of the first year of life.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47895,"journal":{"name":"Infancy","volume":"30 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145507473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Time to Talk: Variability in Caregiver-Child Verbal Engagement During Everyday Activities Sampled From Daylong Recordings","authors":"Janet Y. Bang,&nbsp;Arlyn Mora,&nbsp;Mónica Munévar,&nbsp;Anne Fernald,&nbsp;Virginia A. Marchman","doi":"10.1111/infa.70051","DOIUrl":"10.1111/infa.70051","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Children learn language through interactions with others. To document variation in how caregivers engage verbally with their 2-year-old children, we sampled six 10-min segments of dense child-directed speech from naturalistic daylong audio recordings in an economically- and linguistically-diverse sample of English- (<i>n</i> = 45) and Spanish-speaking (<i>n</i> = 45) families. Segments of child-directed speech occurred during child-centered (e.g., booksharing, play) and adult-centered (e.g., cooking) activities, with substantial variation among families. During all activity types, child-directed speech was associated with one or more linguistic or interactive features that have been shown to facilitate language development, such as lexical diversity, mean length of utterance (MLU), or responsiveness to children. Moderate to strong stability within families was found, suggesting that caregivers in some families engaged with children more than in others, regardless of the activities in which they participated. Patterns were generally similar across language groups. This study extends previous research by using naturalistic daylong recordings to explore how activity type and caregivers' individual tendencies relate to children's early language experiences.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47895,"journal":{"name":"Infancy","volume":"30 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145490716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Relation Between Goal-Predictive Gaze Behavior and Imitation—A Live Eye-Tracking Study in 12-Month-Olds","authors":"Franziska Sieber,&nbsp;Jan Czarnomski,&nbsp;Moritz M. Daum,&nbsp;Norbert Zmyj","doi":"10.1111/infa.70050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.70050","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Children learn from others by imitating observed behavior. According to some theorists, to imitate an agent's action, infants need to identify the agent's action goal. To test this assumption, goal-predictive gaze shifts of 104 German 12-month-olds (57 female) were measured using live eye-tracking. These goal-predictive gaze shifts were related to their imitation of an action performed by a live model. This relationship was controlled for in terms of cognitive developmental status. We used one task of the imitation battery FIT 12 and analyzed the infants' imitation and goal-predictive gaze shifts. The infants showed goal-predictive gaze shifts to actions presented at a realistic speed. Furthermore, imitation was related to their goal-predictive gaze shifts. This association was partially explained by cognitive-developmental status, which should be considered an important factor in the development of imitation.</p>","PeriodicalId":47895,"journal":{"name":"Infancy","volume":"30 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/infa.70050","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145436336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cross-Cultural Applicability and Psychometric Properties of an Infant Social-Emotional Screening Instrument","authors":"Chieh-Yu Chen","doi":"10.1111/infa.70048","DOIUrl":"10.1111/infa.70048","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In this study, the psychometric properties of the 6-month age interval of the Ages and Stages Questionnaires: Social-Emotional, Second Edition (ASQ:SE-2) in its English and traditional Chinese versions were examined by using item response theory. A total of 2612 and 915 caregivers from the United States and Taiwan, respectively, were asked to complete the ASQ:SE-2 to evaluate the social-emotional development of their infants, aged 3 months and 0 days to 8 months and 30 days. Psychometric analysis revealed promising item fit, with item difficulty consistent with the instrument's intended purpose. Nevertheless, low reliability was observed, with scores of 0.64 for the US sample and 0.66 for the Taiwanese sample. Differential item functioning (DIF) analysis identified significant differences in item function between the two cultural samples, with 40.9% (9 of 22) of the items having moderate to large DIF values. These items belonged to the self-regulation, adaptive functioning, social communication, and interaction domains of the ASQ:SE-2. These differences likely stemmed from differences in culture. Overall, these findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how this parent-reported instrument functions across cultural groups, and they underscore the importance of culturally sensitive adaptations in international contexts.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47895,"journal":{"name":"Infancy","volume":"30 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145356330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empathy Development: Typical and Atypical Tracks, From Infancy to Early Childhood","authors":"Ronit Roth-Hanania","doi":"10.1111/infa.70049","DOIUrl":"10.1111/infa.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Empathy, a cornerstone of human social functioning, begins its developmental journey early in life, shaped by a complex interplay of neurobiological, emotional, cognitive, and social influences. This article offers a comprehensive review of the typical and atypical developmental pathways of empathy from infancy to early childhood. Challenging traditional models that positioned empathy's emergence in toddlerhood, recent evidence suggests that early markers of empathic concern and cognitive understanding of others' distress are observable as early as the first year of life. The review highlights how neurobiological maturation, emotion regulation, and early caregiver-infant interactions converge to support the development of empathy. It also examines how deviations from typical trajectories—such as in autism spectrum disorder (ASD)—manifest as early deficits in social attention, emotional sharing, and prosocial behavior. Identifying prodromal markers of ASD through impairments in empathy manifested in young infants' responses to distress, the article underscores the critical role of early detection and intervention in mitigating long-term socio-emotional challenges. By bridging developmental science and clinical research, this review highlights the significance of empathy as both a developmental milestone and a diagnostic lens for understanding early socio-emotional dysfunctions. Fostering empathy development is proposed as a crucial factor in promoting adaptive social outcomes across diverse developmental profiles.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47895,"journal":{"name":"Infancy","volume":"30 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145349323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Contextual Approach to Characterizing Caregiver Responsiveness in a Rural Area of The Gambia","authors":"Helena-Céline Stevelt,&nbsp;Ebrima Mbye,&nbsp;Ebou Touray,&nbsp;Tijan Fadera,&nbsp;Mariama Saidykhan,&nbsp;Ousman Kambi,&nbsp;Eirini Papageorgopoulou,&nbsp;Samantha McCann,&nbsp;Clare E. Elwell,&nbsp;Sophie E. Moore,&nbsp;Sarah Lloyd-Fox,&nbsp;Bosiljka Milosavljevic","doi":"10.1111/infa.70047","DOIUrl":"10.1111/infa.70047","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Interactions with caregivers play a crucial role in early development. While most of the world's children live in Majority World countries, research on caregiving predominantly uses measures developed in the Minority World (particularly North America and Europe), potentially biasing characterizations of parenting in understudied populations. This study describes the development of the “Demba Yaal Interaction Scale (DYIS)”, a behavioral micro-coding scheme to assesses caregiver responsiveness in a rural, low-resource, collectivist caregiving community in The Gambia. We adopted a contextually sensitive approach by co-creating the scheme partnering Gambian researchers, familiar with the caregiving context, and UK researchers familiar with behavioral coding. The scheme was piloted on 5-min videorecorded mother-infant interactions, when infants were aged 12-months (<i>N</i> = 50, 48% female). There were substantial individual differences in maternal responsiveness levels. Modality-wise, responses were most likely to be non-verbal, compared to verbal or bimodal. Mothers with some formal education were significantly more responsive and more readily engaged in bimodal responsiveness. Negative associations between these interactive behaviors and maternal demographic and socioeconomic variables (age, number of children, household size) were present but did not remain significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Moreover, associations emerged between infant physical growth and infant behaviors, as well as between maternal responsiveness and infant communication, although these too, did not remain significant after correction for multiple comparison. Our work provides a potential framework for future research seeking to develop contextually tailored assessments of caregiving practices and highlights important demographic and health variables that warrant further examination in larger samples.</p>","PeriodicalId":47895,"journal":{"name":"Infancy","volume":"30 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12487999/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145208052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Input Properties Shape Word Segmentation Performance Across Child Development: A Computational Modeling Study","authors":"Jun Ho Chai,&nbsp;Eon-Suk Ko","doi":"10.1111/infa.70046","DOIUrl":"10.1111/infa.70046","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This study investigates how the linguistic properties of child-directed speech (CDS) change across child development and how these changes affect segmentation performance in computational models. We analyzed a cross-sectional corpus of Korean CDS directed at 35 children between 6 and 30 months of age, observing developmental changes in several linguistic properties, including the proportion of one-word utterances, hapax legomena, and monosyllabic words, as well as utterance and word length, lexical diversity (MATTR), entropy, and the use of onomatopoeic and playful words. Simulated word segmentation revealed an inverse U-shaped trajectory in segmentability, with a group-level peak during the early speech stage. This developmental pattern was largely explained by changes in the linguistic properties of the input. These findings highlight the importance of modeling input–learnability dynamics and suggest that shifts in CDS structure systematically shape the learnability of linguistic units during early language development.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47895,"journal":{"name":"Infancy","volume":"30 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145193404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sleep and Selective Memory Consolidation in Infants: Exploring the Impact of Learning Contexts","authors":"Neele Hermesch,&nbsp;Sabine Seehagen,&nbsp;Rachel Barr,&nbsp;Jane S. Herbert,&nbsp;Carolin Konrad","doi":"10.1111/infa.70045","DOIUrl":"10.1111/infa.70045","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Post-encoding sleep facilitates memory consolidation from early infancy. Learning from digital content might also benefit from post-encoding sleep. However, infants find it more difficult to learn and remember screen content (transfer deficit) and may only recognize its relevance when scaffolded by caregivers. We investigated infants' memory performance as a function of presentation mode (live or video), post-encoding sleep, and caregiver scaffolding with the aim of replicating the transfer deficit and the beneficial effect of a post-encoding nap. We expected the nap benefit to be less pronounced when information was encoded from videos. We compared data from a live (<i>n</i> = 68) and a video experiment (<i>n</i> = 69). In both experiments, 15- and 24-month-olds watched demonstrations of two deferred imitation tasks (live or on prerecorded video). During one of the demonstrations, caregivers scaffolded the task. Half of the infants in each age-group napped for ≥ 30 min after demonstration, whereas the others remained awake for ≥ 4 h. Memory performance was assessed after 24 h counting the reproduced target actions. Contrary to expectations, the nap benefit did not replicate in the live demonstration sample. However, when both samples were examined together there was a main effect of nap condition showing that infants who had napped retrieved more target actions than awake infants. Moreover, cross-experiment comparisons revealed a transfer deficit and an unexpected disruptive effect of caregiver scaffolding on memory performance in 15-month-olds. Results are discussed in light of limits on detecting sleep-mediated memory effects and the challenges of remembering digital information in infancy due to cognitive load.</p>","PeriodicalId":47895,"journal":{"name":"Infancy","volume":"30 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12441478/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145076435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}