Developmental Science最新文献

Infants’ early learning is fast and efficient. Most research on infant learning from social contexts has focused on child-directed activities, such as toy play. However, learning in everyday contexts may not be limited to child-directed activities. Routines at home consist of other activities, such as meal preparation, laundry, and chores, that may still offer learning opportunities for infants. But infants can only learn from these moments if they are paying attention. Here, we provide the first examination of infant attention during non-child-directed everyday activity. In a home-like laboratory environment, parents prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in front of infants who sat in a highchair across from them, as they might every day at home. Head-mounted eye trackers were used to record gaze data from infants, which was then temporally aligned with parent actions to measure infants’ attention to the task. Our findings reveal that, despite the presence of a room full of distractors, infants most often focused on task-related objects. Although infants only tracked parents’ actions for 40% of the session, they prioritized looking at parents’ more complex actions and looked equally at parents’ actions and the objects they themselves were engaged with. In addition, when parents were more engaged with their infants (e.g., looking at them and talking to them), infants paid more attention. These findings indicate that infants are attuned to the routines and activities of daily life and that parental engagement can play a critical role in enhancing this attention. This suggests that even routine tasks, often overlooked as learning opportunities, can be transformed into valuable moments for development. By examining how infants allocate their attention in naturalistic settings, we can better understand the role of everyday experiences in early learning and explore how parents can optimize these moments to support their infants’ growth.

Summary

Role ethics suggests that moral obligations arise from the duties associated with one's social roles. Yet, the influence of social roles on children's moral behavior remains unclear. This research addressed this gap by testing whether assigning social roles increased sharing in 5- to 6-year-old children and whether peer modeling enhanced role-based sharing across two studies in the Chinese population (N = 192; 96 girls). In Study 1, children were either assigned a “duty student” role, a role highly related to duties, or received no role, and then engaged in a sharing task. Before making their sharing decisions, they observed a group of peers—either all duty students or all without roles—engaging in unanimous generous sharing. Results showed that after observing peer modeling, children assigned the duty student role shared significantly more than those without the role. Moreover, children's normative judgments about sharing were influenced by both their own assigned roles and the roles of the peer models, and these judgments were associated with their sharing behavior. Study 2 found that simply assigning the role, without exposure to peer modeling, did not increase children's sharing. Their normative judgments about sharing were also unaffected by their assigned roles and were largely unrelated to their sharing behavior. Taken together, these findings suggest that Chinese young children engage in role-based prosocial behavior from an early age, and that exposure to peer models can potentially enhance role-based morality.

Summary

Anxious temperament (AT) is a nonhuman primate phenotype that models childhood behavioral inhibition, a prominent risk factor for anxiety disorders and stress-related psychopathology. To understand its earliest antecedents, we characterized AT's developmental trajectory over the first year of life. Infant monkeys (n = 35, 24 females) were longitudinally phenotyped for AT by assessing threat-related increases in freezing behavior, reductions in coo-calling, and increases in circulating cortisol at 1.5, 6, 12, 24, and 52 weeks. AT levels increased linearly, reaching mature levels by 52 weeks. Individual differences in AT, and its components, were stable across development. These findings support further studies during early primate life aimed to uncover neurobiological factors mediating development of this phenotype, which in humans is linked to stress-related psychopathology.

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The development of uncertainty sensitivity, a critical cognitive ability, presents a challenging paradox: Some evidence points to its emergence in infancy, whereas other evidence indicates much later emergence and protracted development. To resolve this paradox, we propose that early uncertainty sensitivity relies on perceptual cues to ignorance (e.g., occluded information), whereas uncertainty monitoring in the absence of such cues develops later. We tested this hypothesis using a random dot kinematogram task that manipulated uncertainty through signal-to-noise ratios, without perceptual cues to ignorance or knowledge. Participants aged 4–6 years and adults (N = 189) made perceptual judgments of the directionality of dot movement or opted out under varying uncertainty levels. While all groups demonstrated above-chance accuracy in perceptual judgments, children and adults differed markedly in their responses to uncertainty. Unlike adults, most children's decisions were not affected by uncertainty. These results suggest that without perceptual cues to ignorance, children struggle to detect, monitor, and respond to uncertainty. We propose that early uncertainty sensitivity found in some studies relies on perceptual cues to ignorance (i.e., bottom-up attentional mechanisms), with strategic uncertainty monitoring developing more gradually. Our findings help reconcile contradictory results in uncertainty sensitivity development and highlight the role of perceptual cues and metacognition in children's decision-making under uncertainty.

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Adults are known to identify their own body through a combination of multisensory cues and top-down expectations regarding its form, while children may possess a more flexible body representation. Here we use virtual reality to test how children and adults use form cues to feel ownership over a virtual hand with novel, varying degrees of corporeality and how a sense of ownership of the hand and movement fluency with it may be trained. In Experiment 1, children (N = 40, 6–8 years) and adults (N = 45) experienced four virtual hand forms (Hand, hand with a missing Thumb, crab-like Claw, Cross). Participants had to catch slowly moving virtual feathers while the virtual hand form moved in and out of synchrony with their own hand movements. In Experiment 2, we gave each child (N = 10, 6–9 years) and adult (N = 11) repeated experience with the Claw. Across studies we found that sensations of ownership over the virtual hand were facilitated by human-like forms, movement synchrony, and short-term training. For children only, we also found that human-like forms maintained a strong facilitatory influence even when movement was asynchronous. Further, for children only, training improved movement fluency and increased the sense that the virtual form was a ‘tool' rather than a hand. We suggest that children's top-down expectations regarding their body do not always interact with their multisensory inputs; their experiences are sharpened with training more than adults; and repeated short virtual experiences do not blur children's perceived distinction between the real and virtual self.

Summary