Infancy最新文献

To investigate the development of positive affect during early infancy across cultures, we conducted a joyful affect–eliciting dyadic face-to-face interaction between a female experimenter and 3- and 4.5-month-old infants from Münster (urban Germany; n = 20 at 3 months, n = 20 at 4.5 months) and indigenous Kichwa families from the Andean context (rural Ecuador; n = 24 at 3 months, n = 27 at 4.5 months), which differ in their ethnotheories about infants' ideal affect. Results pointed to cross-cultural differences in infants' affective reactivity to high-intensity stimulation, namely higher intensities of positive affect at 3 months in Münster as compared to Kichwa infants that disappeared at 4.5 months of age. The findings serve as an important complement to naturalistic studies that have left open the question of the developmental continuity of cross-cultural differences in infant positive affect beyond 3 months. We discuss our findings in terms of a dynamic interaction between culturally informed parent-infant interactions and biological potentials that give rise to both cross-cultural similarities and differences in the course of emotional development, even in early infancy.

To learn a word from an everyday context, infants need to be able to link the heard word with the correct object perceived. A prevailing view of the early learning environment is that infants' world is bombarded with objects and words. Therefore, it is difficult to find the named object from many possible candidates. However, building correct word-referent mappings relies on in-moment visual selection, it is not clear what infants attend to when learning words in a naturalistic context. Toward this goal, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment in which 12-month-old infants were presented with complex visual scenes extracted from infants' egocentric videos recorded during naturalistic parent-child toy play. These scenes were selected at naming moments when parents labeled a toy object during free-flowing play. We selected visual scenes from a mix of more or less ambiguous naming events that contained different visual properties of the named objects and measured infants' real-time object-looking behaviors. We found that, despite the different visual properties of infants' egocentric scenes, early visual attention is both selective and variable. Selective visual attention is highly constrained by the visual saliency of the learning scenes, but not influenced by labels or existing word knowledge. Infants are more likely to attend to the named object when it is salient in the egocentric view. Our results suggest that although infants' naturalistic learning environment appears to be messy in terms of the number of possible objects for a heard object name, their selective attention significantly reduces the in-moment uncertainty associated with object name learning.

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.