Infancy最新文献

The relation between pointing and walking in infants was investigated through a 1-year observation study at a daycare center in Tokyo, Japan. The participants were 23 Japanese infants (mean age 13.1 months, 8 boys and 15 girls) from middle-SES families. Data from each infant were analyzed at 4 months before and after the onset of walking. It was shown that as infants develop locomotion, the frequency of pointing, the proportion of social pointing, and the proportion of social pointing accompanied by movement and looking behavior increase, while the proportion of pointing accompanied by prior interaction decreases. These changes were suggested to be more strongly associated with the acquisition of walking than with the infants' age itself. Furthermore, for pointing without prior interaction, it was shown that when pointing was combined with the infant's movement, it tended to increase the success of attentional sharing through pointing.

This study explores how physical contact is used in parent-infant dyads from 9 to 12 months of age, focusing on the role of touch and the use of objects in supporting language development. Thirty-five monolingual Spanish-speaking dyads were observed longitudinally in a free play situation. We analyzed physical contact, considering who initiated the contact, its function, the use of objects and the coordination with speech. Results showed that adults initiated physical contact more frequently than infants, particularly at 9 months, while infant-initiated touch tended to be longer in duration and predominantly affective in nature. In contrast, adult-initiated touch was often functional and, when involving objects, frequently accompanied by verbal input. Notably, these object-mediated tactile cues were used to convey social meanings and were synchronized with speech, suggesting a scaffolding function for lexical development. As infants’ comprehension increased, the frequency of these cues decreased, indicating a developmental shift toward more distal communication strategies. These findings highlight the importance of tactile interaction in multimodal communication and in the establishment of joint attention frames, especially during the period of transition to first words, underscoring the need for a broader understanding of language as a multimodal phenomenon.

Young children across the globe devote much of their early years to physically engaging with the world—stacking, climbing, scribbling, and tinkering with objects. Although this embodied play is widely believed to fuel key cognitive processes like attention, memory, and executive function, most supporting evidence remains descriptive or correlational. Here, we review findings from embodied cognition research and highlight why direct experimental manipulations—rather than observations alone—are critical to demonstrating whether and how infants’ and children’s sensorimotor engagements shape their cognitive trajectories. We discuss emerging technologies (e.g., motion capture, wearable eye-tracking) that can assess play in natural contexts, along with the use of embodied computational models for testing the impact of altered object affordances and caregiver scaffolding. We propose designs for real-world interventions such as rotating different types of toys, systematically modifying motor demands, and tracking outcomes in attention and problem-solving, which can bring new causal clarity to developmental science. We argue that a causal science of play will have broad implications for early education, policy, and intervention programs that aim to transform the theory of embodied cognition into practical benefits for children's learning and development.

Although several studies independently explore temperament and parenting, research on connections between temperament and mind-mindedness are largely absent. This study examined relationships between maternal mind-mindedness and infant temperament on infant socioemotional wellbeing. Participants comprised culturally diverse mother-infant dyads (n = 63; 52.38% girls). Infants, aged 4- (n = 32) and 8-months-old (n = 31), and their mothers completed a free-play task. While direct relationships between mind-mindedness and wellbeing were not supported, an indirect interactional relationship between mind-mindedness and temperament on wellbeing was supported. Mind-mindedness moderated the relationship between negative affect and socioemotional development whereby infants with higher negative affect who received higher appropriate comments had better socioemotional wellbeing than their lower negative affect counterparts. This highlights that, for higher negative affect infants, appropriate comments are particularly influential in enhancing wellbeing. Effortful control predicted wellbeing, suggesting that specific temperament traits experience optimal socioemotional development independently of mind-minded parenting. These findings broaden research knowledge regarding the differential susceptibility hypothesis. Overall, this study has shown how wellbeing can be affected by the temperamental dispositions that infants bring into the world as well as the parenting experiences that they encounter.

Automated eye tracking has emerged as a powerful method in psychology, and has special benefits when studying infant populations. The field has developed much during the last decades, and while there are numerous reviews on methodological aspects and specific research topics, a general overview of the state and trends of the field has been lacking. That lack leaves the field unguided on several important aspects such as WEIRDness, statistical power and replication issues, unexploited areas of research, and the current status of the field as a whole. We here conducted a systematic review of the complete peer-reviewed English literature on automated eye tracking with children during their first two years of life (793 articles), and extracted dates of publication, author and population geographic affiliation, keywords and sample sizes. The results show that automated eye tracking in infant research is increasingly used, and is accompanied by larger sample sizes, which together suggests improved accessibility. There is a focus on WEIRD populations, and a few broad research topics (methods, language and attention) and specific topics (autism, faces) are dominating the field. The current focus leaves many areas of research understudied, yielding a large potential for more infant eye tracking in the future.

By the end of the first year, infants use others' emotions to interpret events, integrate social cues and build expectations on how people should behave (e.g., through social referencing). Yet, little is known about the neural correlates of linking others' emotions to following actions. This priming study investigates 10-month-old infants' electrophysiological responses to happy and disgusted emotional displays toward novel objects (prime) and subsequent actions (pushing away or pulling objects closer; target). Event-related potentials from 30 infants showed neural responses associated with emotional processing of the prime, such as heightened attentional response (Nc) and greater cognitive processing (Pc) in response to happiness over disgust. The target action of pushing away objects elicited increased slow wave activity when following happiness. Additionally, a significant mu-rhythm desynchronization, indicating motor resonance, was observed for pulling objects closer when preceded by happiness. Theta activity was higher for pushing away objects, indexing this as an unexpected event. These findings indicate that by 10 months, infants attend to emotional cues and use these cues to form predictions about subsequent actions. These neural correlates of bridging emotions and actions before 12 months of life reveal early neural sensitivity for processing social cues in complex contexts.

Research on the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on infant emotional development has produced mixed results, often limited by methodological constraints, such as not having access to data prior to and after pandemic onset. This study helps overcome these limitations by analyzing data from 330 infants (51% female; 54% White, non-Hispanic) across five points in the first 2 years of life, from October 2016 to August 2021. Multilevel growth models indicated that negative affect decreased following pandemic onset, contrary to the expected and observed increase in negative affect prior to the pandemic. Higher levels of contextual risk (maternal trait anxiety, neighborhood disadvantage) were associated with higher levels of infant negative affect, irrespective of the pandemic. These findings further our understanding of the pandemic's impact on child development.