Infancy最新文献

Development takes place when change in one domain cascades into change in another domain. Preterm infants exhibit disruptions to their object play and the maintenance of a joint focus of attention with another person. Likewise, they tend to experience cognitive delays throughout childhood. By the developmental cascades model, early features of object play and joint engagement in preterm infants predict cognitive development. We examined longitudinal associations between real-time individual differences in parent-infant interactions and long-term outcomes to explore potential developmental processes. Features of infant-object interactions and joint engagement were coded in 20 12-month-old preterm infants (≤ 29 weeks of gestation) during parent-infant free play. Infants were tested again at 30 months using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, Third Edition. Preterm infants spent most of their time interacting with objects at 12 months, and their parents frequently engaged in their object interactions. The frequency of infant-object interaction bouts per minute at 12 months was negatively associated with 30-month cognitive scores. Furthermore, the percentage of infant-object interaction bouts in which parents practised multimodal engagement was marginally associated with 30-month cognitive scores. We discuss the associations of infant-object interactions and joint engagement with preterm infants' cognitive development.

There are theoretical debates about the definition of joint attention, and empirical debates about when it emerges in development. Here we addressed both debates by investigating the emergence of infants' communicative joint attention bids: looks to their partner's face, accompanied by communicative facial expressions and/or vocalizations, to attempt to initiate joint attention to a referent. We tested 25 infants monthly, longitudinally, between 6 and 10 months using both novel joint attention elicitation tests and free play observations. Even when using a conservative definition of joint attention involving communication, results indicated that a substantial percentage of infants (44%) had already begun to produce joint attention bids by 6 months, with the vast majority (92%) having done so before 9 months. Joint attention bids emerged gradually, with increasing consistency, and were seen earlier in the novel elicitation tests than in free play, suggesting that previous work focusing on free play might have underestimated infants' joint attention. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of joint attention and communication.

Seeing adults use cellphones is a common daily experience for infants, yet little is known about how infants think about others’ cellphone use. Do infants recognize that phone usage can affect the user’s behavior? Here we asked whether infants expect a person’s task performance to be impaired by phone use. Twenty-month-old infants watched adults building block towers. One adult did this while also using a phone, either looking at the screen and scrolling (Experiment 1; N = 24) or simply talking (Experiment 2; N = 24). Across both experiments, infants looked longer when the person who had been using the phone built a taller tower than the person who had not been using the phone, compared to the reverse. This suggests that infants expected phone usage to negatively impact performance. Thus, early in development, children recognize that cell phone use can affect people's goal-directed actions; this may be one example of a broader understanding of the impact of multitasking on performance.

Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Kachergis, G., Masek, L. R., Gonzalez, S. L., Soska, K. C., Herzberg, O., Xu, M., Adolph, K. E., Gilmore, R. O., Bornstein, M. H., Casasola, M., Fausey, C. M., Frank, M. C., Goldin-Meadow, S., Gros-Louis, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Iverson, J., Lew-Williams, C., MacWhinney, B., … Yurovsky, D. (2024). Comparing apples to manzanas and oranges to naranjas: A new measure of English-Spanish vocabulary for dual language learners. Infancy, 29(3), 302–326. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12571.

In the above referenced article, author Laura L. Namy's name should have appeared without an institutional affiliation.

Child inhibited temperament is influenced by parenting behaviors, and vice versa. Fathers remain underrepresented in studies examining relations between parenting and temperament. The current study focused on fathers, using a three-point longitudinal design. Father-child dyads (n = 116; 56.9% Male; 88.7% White) participated in laboratory assessments at child ages 1, 2, and 3 years. Children participated in observational tasks designed to measure inhibited temperament, and fathers self-reported parenting behaviors and rated their child's temperament. Path models testing concurrent and longitudinal relations revealed that paternal nurturance, restrictiveness, and encouragement of independence were associated with observed inhibited temperament in infancy, but not with father-rated inhibited temperament. Early observed child inhibited temperament at age 1 year predicted greater levels of paternal encouragement of independence at age 2 years. Findings demonstrated evidence for both father-directed and child-directed effects, suggesting fathers and children influence each other's behavior over time. Overall, this study supports continued focus on fathers' parenting and provides insight into the nuanced impact of fathering on child temperament development.

Parents use music, especially singing, to interact with their young children, supporting parent-child bonding and social communication. Little is known about the parental attributes that support musical interactions with their infants. In this exploratory study, we analyzed self-report data from 43 caregiver/infant dyads at up to four time points (9, 12, 15, and 18 months) to assess parent social motivation and musical training as predictors of the home music environment overall, parental singing, and parental beliefs in the benefits of music. We also investigated the home music environment as a predictor of language development longitudinally. Parent social motivation was a stronger predictor of the home music environment than musical training. Parents' social motivation was positively related to parental singing, beliefs, and overall music environment, while musical training was only related to their beliefs. Furthermore, parent singing and overall home music, but not parental beliefs, were associated with infants' vocabulary comprehension, production, and gestures. Results highlight that music engagement in early childhood is fundamentally a social experience and emphasize the importance of parents' active participation (vs. only their beliefs) in musical experiences with their infant. The social nature of music experiences in infancy may contribute to relationships between the home music environment and child language development.

Infants are highly sensitive to social stimuli from early on in ontogeny. Social cues, including others' gaze, not only capture and guide infants' attention, but also modulate the efficiency in which the infant (brain) encodes and recognizes information. Over the last two decades, the novelty preference based object-processing paradigm has been instrumental in investigating this phenomenon experimentally. This paper offers a comprehensive review and critical evaluation of methodological aspects and empirical findings from previous research using this paradigm to study the influence of (non-)social cues on infants' object processing. We highlight the critical role of methodological details and discuss influential factors such as eye contact, infants' object-directed attention, naturalistic environments, and potential neural correlates associated with enhanced object encoding. A comprehensive review table summarizes key methodological details from previous studies to assist researchers in making informed decisions when designing future studies. We conclude that the object-processing paradigm has proven to be an effective method with high potential for future research disentangling the influence of fine-grained factors on infants' object memory.