Advances in Child Development and Behavior最新文献

One of the most important challenges for a developing infant is learning how best to allocate their attention and forage for information in the midst of a great deal of novel stimulation. We propose that infants of altricial species solve this challenge by learning selectively from events that are contingent on their immature behavior, such as babbling. Such a contingency filter would focus attention and learning on the behavior of social partners, because social behavior reliably fits infants' sensitivity to contingency. In this way a contingent response by a caregiver to an immature behavior becomes a source of learnable information - feedback - to the infant. Social interactions with responsive caregivers afford infants opportunities to explore the impacts of their immature behavior on their environment, which facilitates the development of socially guided learning. Furthermore, contingent interactions are opportunities to make and test predictions about the efficacy of their social behaviors and those of others. In this chapter, we will use prelinguistic vocal learning to exemplify how infants use their developing vocal abilities to elicit learnable information about language from their social partners. Specifically, we review how caregivers' contingent responses to babbling create information that facilitates infant vocal learning and drives the development of communication. Infants play an active role in this process, as their developing predictions about the consequences of their actions serve to further refine their allocation of attention and drive increases in the maturity of their vocal behavior.

Audio-visual recording and location tracking produce enormous quantities of digital data with which researchers can document children's everyday interactions in naturalistic settings and assessment contexts. Machine learning and other computational approaches can produce replicable, automated measurements of these big behavioral data. The economies of scale afforded by repeated automated measurements offer a potent approach to investigating linkages between real-time behavior and developmental change. In our work, automated measurement of audio from child-worn recorders-which quantify the frequency of child and adult speech and index its phonemic complexity-are paired with ultrawide radio tracking of children's location and interpersonal orientation. Applications of objective measurement indicate the influence of adult behavior in both expert ratings of attachment behavior and ratings of autism severity, suggesting the role of dyadic factors in these "child" assessments. In the preschool classroom, location/orientation measures provide data-driven measures of children's social contact, fertile ground for vocal interactions. Both the velocity of children's movement toward one another and their social contact with one another evidence homophily: children with autism spectrum disorder, other developmental disabilities, and typically developing children were more likely to interact with children in the same group even in inclusive preschool classrooms designed to promote interchange between all children. In the vocal domain, the frequency of peer speech and the phonemic complexity of teacher speech predict the frequency and phonemic complexity of children's own speech over multiple timescales. Moreover, children's own speech predicts their assessed language abilities across disability groups, suggesting how everyday interactions facilitate development.

Latinx youth in the United States face structural barriers that contribute to inequities across multiple domains (e.g., education, juvenile justice, healthcare systems), as racial biases permeate social institutions. The systemic oppression resulting from racism can be seen in disparities across many indicators of health, including physical health, education, socioeconomic conditions, and the overrepresentation of ethnic and racial minority individuals, including Latinx individuals, incarcerated and exposed to violence. We present an approach to combat social inequities and injustices by promoting and fostering prosocial behaviors (i.e., actions that benefit others) between majority and minority members of our society. Existing theories and research on the factors that can promote such behaviors across youth from different backgrounds is summarized though we highlight work in U.S. Latinx youth. Factors that enhance and undermine prosocial behaviors towards diverse others is also summarized. Finally, some recommendations for intervention and policy efforts are briefly presented.

Though much is known about the emergence and development of gaze following in infancy, there are large disagreements in some critical areas and major uncertainties within others. In this work, we highlight some of these areas in terms of five big questions that we believe are essential to address in order to advance research in the field. (1) How does social environment and culture impact gaze following? (2) What mechanisms drive the emergence of gaze following? (3) Does gaze following facilitate language development? (4) Is diminished gaze following an early marker of Autism? (5) How does gaze following relate to perspective-taking? This chapter aims not to answer these questions but to stimulate a discussion about the fundamental principles and assumptions on which the field resides and potentially serve as a guide for future research programs.

How do infants and young children reason about other people? What inferences do they make when they learn from teachers and whom do they choose to learn from? Past research in developmental psychology has demonstrated infants' and young children's competence in making these inferences. However, the mechanisms underlying these inferences and how these mechanisms change across development are less clear. In this chapter, we review a growing body of Bayesian probabilistic models on intuitive psychology and social learning. We integrate these models with past and new empirical studies within the framework of rational constructivism. These models showed that infants and children have intuitive theories about others (agents, teachers, and informants). When given new evidence, they rationally update their beliefs about others and their beliefs about the world based on these intuitive theories. Developmental changes can be explained by advances in children's intuitive theories. Finally, we propose future directions for both empirical and modeling work in these domains.

With longitudinal studies and recently-developed analyses that can model change, it has become increasingly clear that many types of peer experiences during childhood and adolescence are not static. Instead, such experiences change in numerous ways over time, with significant developmental implications. Most of this recent work, however, has focused on change and stability in group-level peer experiences such as peer victimization, peer exclusion, and popularity. As a result, less is known about the extent to which change occurs, and the developmental significance of such changes, in youths' dyadic-level peer experiences and specifically their friendships. Thus, the goal of this chapter is to illustrate the importance of studying friendship change during childhood and adolescence. To do so, we first review the literature on friendship, in general, and then that pertaining to friendship instability and friendship loss, two related areas of friendship change research that have received some theoretical and empirical attention. We introduce a new friendship development model, and informed by this model, encourage peer relations researchers to consider other types of change in friendships. The concluding sections concentrate on the importance of learning more about friendship change for intervention and prevention efforts with youth.

In this chapter, major trends in the development of metacognitive competences and its relationship to various aspects of cognitive/academic performance are described, with a focus on metamemory and reading comprehension. In a first step, classic and more recent theoretical models of metacognitive competences are presented that elaborate on the development of the declarative and procedural components of metacognition. The declarative component focuses on explicit and verbalizable knowledge, whereas the procedural component deals with monitoring and self-regulation processes. Common measures of both components are presented next, followed by a description of major developmental trends, as indicated by cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on developmental differences and changes in declarative knowledge, memory and comprehension monitoring, and self-regulation. Furthermore, research findings illustrating the relationship between metacognitive competences and cognitive performance in childhood and adolescence are presented for the domains of memory and reading comprehension, respectively. The final section focuses on educational implications of research on metacognition, underlining the importance of teacher behavior in the classroom and special instruction programs for students' acquisition of metacognitive competences.

A growing body of literature suggests strong associations between environmental factors and young children's early language and literacy development. In the United States, large socio-economic differences are evident in children's skills when they enter Kindergarten, differences that persist through schooling and can be explained by children's early communicative environments. Here, I highlight three themes that characterize the features of children's communicative environments that are found to promote language learning: (1) Talking with children helps more than talking to children, (2) Linguistic input should increase in diversity and complexity during early childhood, and (3) A gradual transition from contextualized to decontextualized conversations is helpful. There are many reasons for the large variability in early communicative environments within and across social class groups. Two primary reasons include parents' knowledge of child development and parenting stress. Social policies that reduce parenting stress and increase parental knowledge have the potential to improve early language environments and lead to better educational outcomes for all children.

Adolescent development is often regarded as a period of social sensitivities, given that brain development continues into the early 20s in interplay with social experiences. In this review, we present adolescence as a unique window for prosocial development; that is, behavior that benefits others. We present evidence for multiple pathways of neural sensitivity that contribute to key developmental processes related to prosocial behaviors, including valuing, perspective taking, and goal-flexibility. Yet, these processes are dependent on several contextual factors including recipients, audience effects, and strategic motivations. Next, we present intervention findings suggesting that prosocial experiences within these various contexts are crucial for adolescents developing into engaged and contributing members of society. These findings suggest a new interpretation of the elevated socio-affective sensitivity and emerging socio-cognitive development in adolescence, focusing on opportunities rather than risks.