Alexandra Hendry, Manuela Stets, Pasco Fearon, Mark Johnson, Karla Holmboe
{"title":"Neural Markers of Attention at 6 Months Associate With Later Attentional Control Performance","authors":"Alexandra Hendry, Manuela Stets, Pasco Fearon, Mark Johnson, Karla Holmboe","doi":"10.1111/desc.13582","DOIUrl":"10.1111/desc.13582","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Attentional control is key to the development of executive functions. Previous research indicates that individual differences in attentional control behaviour may be stable from 6 months. Here, we analyse electroencephalogram data collected from 59 6-month-olds to gain insights into the neural processes underlying attentional control in infancy. First, we examine the neural activity preceding distinct looking behaviours in an attentional control task at 6 months. Second, we test whether those neural markers show predictive associations to behavioural measures of attentional control (Freeze-Frame task) and executive function (A-not-B task) in the same infants at 9 months. Whilst our data do not show evidence that 6–9 Hz power is implicated in attentional control at 6 months, or that the P1 ERP component plays a role in our attentional control task, we do find evidence that corroborates and extends research linking 3–6 Hz power to attentional control. At the group level, frontal 3–6 Hz power recorded whilst looking to a central target before the onset of a peripheral distractor was greater during trials where infants subsequently looked to the distractor, compared with trials where they did not look. Higher 3–6 Hz power in trials where the infant <i>did not</i> look to a peripheral distractor was predictive of less distractibility at 9 months, and higher 3 Hz power in trials where infants <i>did</i> look to the distractor strengthened the predictive association from 6-month EEG to 9-month behaviour. We suggest 3–6 Hz activity may be sensitive to multiple processes, such as anticipatory attention, and the ability to maintain attention on a target.</p>","PeriodicalId":48392,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Science","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/desc.13582","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142592130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vocabulary Composition Shapes Language Development in Children With Cochlear Implants","authors":"Lynn K. Perry, Daniel S. Messinger, Ivette Cejas","doi":"10.1111/desc.13588","DOIUrl":"10.1111/desc.13588","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Although vocabulary size is thought to index children's language abilities, an increasing body of work suggests that regularities in children's vocabulary composition, particularly the proportion of shape-based nouns (e.g., cup), support language development. Here we examine initial vocabulary composition in children with hearing loss following cochlear implantation (<i>n</i> = 163) and age-matched children with normal hearing (<i>n</i> = 87). This comparison constitutes an experiment in nature for understanding how early vocabulary composition shapes subsequent language development in the context of the clinical provision of auditory experience. Children with higher initial proportions of shape-based nouns had larger vocabularies and scored higher on tests of receptive and expressive language abilities at 1, 2, and 3 years follow-up, than children whose vocabularies had lower proportions of shape-based nouns. These effects were strongest for cochlear implant users, especially 2–3 years postimplantation. The results suggest that knowing shape-based nouns facilitates language development and may ameliorate delayed language development trajectories.</p>","PeriodicalId":48392,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Science","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11567059/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142592138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Samuel David Jones, Manon Wyn Jones, Kami Koldewyn, Gert Westermann
{"title":"Perception and Cognitive Control in Rationally Inattentive Child Behaviour","authors":"Samuel David Jones, Manon Wyn Jones, Kami Koldewyn, Gert Westermann","doi":"10.1111/desc.13587","DOIUrl":"10.1111/desc.13587","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Astle, Johnson, and Akarca (2024) and Mani (2024) raise important questions about the representativeness of the theory and neural network model presented in Jones et al. (2024). In response, we briefly lay out future research priorities and the implications of a fully developed theory of rational inattention for how we think about, measure, and respond to individual differences in child development.</p>","PeriodicalId":48392,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Science","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/desc.13587","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142592133","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rebecca Zhu, Helen O. Pitchik, Tabitha Nduku Kilonzo, Jan Engelmann, Lia C. Fernald, Alison Gopnik
{"title":"The Development of Picture Comprehension Across Early Environments: Evidence From Urban and Rural Toddlers in Western Kenya","authors":"Rebecca Zhu, Helen O. Pitchik, Tabitha Nduku Kilonzo, Jan Engelmann, Lia C. Fernald, Alison Gopnik","doi":"10.1111/desc.13579","DOIUrl":"10.1111/desc.13579","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Early childhood researchers frequently use learning materials and assessments involving pictures, across different cultures and contexts. However, there is variation in when and how children across cultures and contexts begin to understand and learn from pictures. While children growing up in high-income contexts often have more experience with picture books and other kinds of two-dimensional visual symbols, children growing up in low-income, rural contexts in low- and middle-income countries often have less experience with pictures and other kinds of visual symbols. The current research leverages variation in picture experience within a geographical region to investigate whether previous picture experience is related to toddlers’ (1) performance on a picture-based word learning task, and (2) referential understanding, controlling for maternal education, number of toys, caregiver talk, and caregiver play. One hundred and twenty-eight toddlers in urban and rural western Kenya (<i>n </i>= 64 per area), who had varying amounts of picture experience, participated in a picture-based word learning task. Preregistered analyses with the entire sample showed no relation between picture experience and performance on a picture-based word learning task, or between picture experience and referential understanding. However, exploratory analyses found a positive association between picture experience and performance on the picture-based word learning task in the urban sample, but not the rural sample. We found no association between toddlers’ referential understanding and picture experience, in either sample. We discuss how these results may inform the efficacy of learning materials and the validity of assessments used with children from diverse global backgrounds.</p>","PeriodicalId":48392,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Science","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/desc.13579","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142592135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Culture Shapes the Early Development of Essentialist Beliefs","authors":"Yian Xu, Michelle Wang, Kelsey Moty, Marjorie Rhodes","doi":"10.1111/desc.13586","DOIUrl":"10.1111/desc.13586","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>People represent many categories and their features as determined by intrinsic essences. These essentialist beliefs reflect biased views of the world that can hinder scientific reasoning and contribute to social prejudice. To consider the extent to which such essentialist views originate from culturally-situated processes, the present study tested the developmental trajectories of essentialist beliefs among children growing up in the United States and China (<i>N</i> = 531; ages 3–6). Essentialist beliefs emerged across early childhood in both communities, but their instantiation and trajectories varied across cultures. In the sample from the United States (but not from China), essentialist beliefs that categories and their features are fixed-at-birth and inflexible increased across age. On the other hand, in the sample from China, children held stronger beliefs that categories are objective and explanatory and viewed them as more homogenous with age. Children sampled from these two contexts also showed variation in basic explanatory, linguistic, and inferential processes, suggesting that cultural variation in the development of essentialism across childhood might reflect variation in the basic conceptual biases that children rely on to build intuitive theories of the world.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48392,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Science","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142592113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Should I Stay or Should I Go? Children's Persistence in the Context of Diminishing Rewards","authors":"Seokyung Kim, Daniel Berry, Stephanie M. Carlson","doi":"10.1111/desc.13585","DOIUrl":"10.1111/desc.13585","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Persistence on a task is both beneficial and costly, so it is important to understand how children learn to effectively balance between perseverance and seeking alternatives to reach a goal by monitoring their performance and tracking their progress over time (“adaptive persistence”). Typically developing children (<i>N</i> = 136) ages 3–7 years in the Midwest United States were invited to catch pretend fish at 7 ordered ponds with increasing numbers of fish. Unbeknownst to children, however, the probability of catching fish decreased across successive ponds, making it most rational to briefly “explore” new ponds to learn the payoff structure and then to “exploit” the earlier ponds before their chances ended. A latent class analysis of children's choices suggested three distinct patterns: (a) Explorers (55%), who repeatedly explored novel ponds, despite their lower rewards, (b) Exploiters (24%), who rapidly returned to earlier, more lucrative ponds, and (c) Balancers (21%), who began by exploring novel ponds but later returned to exploit the earlier, more lucrative ponds. Older children showed a greater probability of being classified as Exploiters or Balancers over Explorers. Controlling for age, children with higher executive function and metacognition tended to be classified as Balancers or Exploiters rather than Explorers. These findings suggest that self-regulation is a potential target for interventions aiming to support children's effective and fulfilling decisions.</p>","PeriodicalId":48392,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Science","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/desc.13585","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142548379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Silke Schwarz, Hanno Krafft, Tobias Maurer, Silke Lange, Juliane Schemmer, Thomas Fischbach, Anke Emgenbroich, Sean Monks, Michael Hubmann, David Martin
{"title":"Screen Time, Nature, and Development: Baseline of the Randomized Controlled Study “Screen-free till 3”","authors":"Silke Schwarz, Hanno Krafft, Tobias Maurer, Silke Lange, Juliane Schemmer, Thomas Fischbach, Anke Emgenbroich, Sean Monks, Michael Hubmann, David Martin","doi":"10.1111/desc.13578","DOIUrl":"10.1111/desc.13578","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the first years of life, increased screen media use is presumably associated with health consequences and developmental impairments. “Screen-free till 3” is a prospective Germany-wide randomized intervention study, started in May 2022 with a duration of 3 years. In the intervention group, 2581 pediatric practices received stickers, which were systematically placed in the screening booklet of all children, along with advice to parents to keep children free from screens until the age of 3. A volunteer sample of 17,436 parents received an invitation to take part in the preinterventional questionnaire. The outcomes were parents' internet use (CIUS test), parental screen time in the presence of children, time of screen media in the background, and children's development. Four thousand twenty-one parents answered the questionnaire. 16.7% of mothers and 31.0% of fathers reached the CIUS score of an internet-related disorder. Parents whose children use screen media at an early age had significantly higher CIUS values on average (<i>M</i> = 4.07) than the parents of children who do not yet have any screen time (<i>p</i> < 0.001). Combined developmental characteristics show a negative correlation with parental screen time (<i>p</i> < 0.001). Time spent in nature was positively associated with development (<i>p</i> < 0.001). The evaluation of the survey shows that screen media is to a large extent used on a daily basis. The study confirms the assumption that high screen media use by parents is linked to higher screen media use by children and also has a negative impact on child development.</p><p><b>Trial Registration</b>: Number: RKS00032258; https://drks.de/search/en/trial/DRKS00032258</p>","PeriodicalId":48392,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Science","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11618238/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142510580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Infants Link Nonce Phrases to Scenes With Objects and Predicates","authors":"Angelica Buerkin-Pontrelli, Daniel Swingley","doi":"10.1111/desc.13574","DOIUrl":"10.1111/desc.13574","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun–object) more readily formed than others (verb–predicate)? We examined English learning 14–15-month-olds’ capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity, or the object's motion. Infants heard the syllables in either a Verb–Subject (VS) or Subject–Verb (SV) order. Learning was tested using preferential looking. The results showed that infants learned the nouns and verbs equally well. In addition, in both the VS- and SV-consistent conditions, infants learned the meaning of the utterance-final syllable, but not the utterance-initial one. A follow-up experiment that manipulated the prosodic cues of the test phrases confirmed that infants had decomposed the bisyllabic phrases into two distinct word-units. Thus, any biases potentially favoring noun or verb learning played a smaller role than utterance position did when noun and verb learning were equally supported by context.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48392,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Science","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142477967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Speech-Processing Network Formation of Cochlear-Implanted Toddlers With Early Hearing Experiences","authors":"Meiyun Wu, Haotian Liu, Xue Zhao, Li Lu, Yuyang Wang, Chaogang Wei, Yuhe Liu, Yu-Xuan Zhang","doi":"10.1111/desc.13568","DOIUrl":"10.1111/desc.13568","url":null,"abstract":"<p>To reveal the formation process of speech processing with early hearing experiences, we tracked the development of functional connectivity in the auditory and language-related cortical areas of 84 (36 female) congenitally deafened toddlers using repeated functional near-infrared spectroscopy for up to 36 months post cochlear implantation (CI). Upon hearing restoration, the CI children lacked the modular organization of the mature speech-processing network and demonstrated a higher degree of immaturity in temporo-parietal than temporo-frontal connections. The speech-processing network appeared to form rapidly with early CI experiences, with two-thirds of the developing connections following nonlinear trajectories reflecting possibly more than one synaptogenesis-pruning cycle. A few key features of the mature speech-processing network emerged within the first year of CI hearing, including left-hemispheric advantage, differentiation of the dorsal and ventral processing streams, and functional state (speech listening vs. resting) specific patterns of connectivity development. The developmental changes were predictable of future auditory and verbal communication skills of the CI children, with prominent contribution from temporo-parietal connections in the dorsal stream, suggesting a mediating role of speech-processing network formation with early hearing experiences in speech acquisition.</p>","PeriodicalId":48392,"journal":{"name":"Developmental Science","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/desc.13568","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142477969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}