Developmental Science最新文献

Why do children remember distracting details better than adults? This could be a silver lining—a benefit—of children's immature attention. The present work establishes this link between immature selective attention and children's broader learning. Furthermore, it adjudicates between two ways that immature attention could drive children's broad learning. One possibility is that children have a “diffuse” attentional spotlight, meaning irrelevant information “leaks” into long-term memory as children learn about relevant information. Alternatively, children's attention might dart between relevant and irrelevant information across time. While both mechanisms would broaden learning, only diffuse attention would facilitate memories for relevant and irrelevant information from the same event and associations between them. In a sample of children and adults (n = 130), we find clear evidence that immature attention underlies children's reduced memory selectivity for relevant content. Furthermore, relevant and irrelevant information from the same event were associated in adults' memory but not children's. We also observed that children learned about targets and distractors from different events, a pattern consistent with the idea that children's attention is more likely to dart than diffuse across items. Children's immature and darting attention may, therefore, explain why they remember “distracting” information better than adults.

How infants spend time in everyday life is an important source of day-to-day, infant-to-infant, and age-related variability in development. Here, we measured the frequency of macro-level activity categories—playing, eating and drinking, napping, going on errands, bathing and dressing, watching media, book reading, and being comforted—in infants aged 4–7 and 10–13 months recruited from across the United States (55% female assigned at birth; 40% male assigned at birth; 5% unknown). Unlike past work that used retrospective estimates, we used an ecological momentary assessment sampling method to obtain direct reports of activities from infants’ caregivers via text-message surveys. The resulting data illustrate that play is the most frequent activity within the first year, accounting for half of infants’ waking time. Other frequent activities, such as mealtimes and errands, contribute significantly to how infants spend their time. Older infants spend more time playing and eating/drinking and less time napping and being comforted than younger infants. Importantly, different macro-level activities facilitate or constrain infants' moment-to-moment behaviors, such as holding objects, sitting, and standing, suggesting that the composition of infants’ daily routines shapes opportunities for perceptual-motor learning.

Although cognitive training with varied activities is commonly assumed to maximize training benefits, this has not been systematically tested in children. This randomized controlled trial evaluated outcomes following working memory training with either two, four, or six varied activities compared to an active control in 197 Australian primary school children in Grades 2–5 (7–11 years). The interventions were embedded in Minecraft Education Edition and delivered in class daily over 2 weeks, with the maximum total training dose ranging from 175 to 225 min. The working memory training included backward span and following instructions activities that varied by stimulus type. The active control involved creative worldbuilding. Measures of working memory (near and intermediate transfer), reasoning and inattention (far transfer) were completed at baseline, immediately, and 3-months post-intervention. None of the working memory training conditions (two, four, and six varied activities) performed better than the active control on the outcome measures either immediately or 3 months after the intervention. Findings fail to provide any evidence that varied cognitive training activities maximize cognitive training benefits in children.

Music engagement traits are linked to important developmental language, cognitive, and mental health outcomes, but longitudinal studies have not examined the developmental stability of music engagement across the first few decades of life, especially using genetically informative designs. The current study examined music engagement—defined as being interested and skilled at musical instruments and taking music lessons—across four timepoints in childhood and adolescence to test the hypothesis that genetic influences explain an increasingly larger proportion of variance over time. We also examined how these measures relate to the frequency of music engagement and music listening in adulthood. Analyses were based on archival data from 1878 individuals in the Colorado Adoption/Twin Study of Lifespan behavioral development and cognitive aging (CATSLife), who completed self-reported measures of music engagement at ages 7, 10, 12, and 16 years, and two additional items in established adulthood (mean age 33 years). Results indicated that music engagement was moderately stable throughout childhood and adolescence (r = 0.20 to 0.49). Heritability was larger in males than in females, but only in childhood, with greater stability of shared environmental influences in female children. These measures were modestly correlated with the frequency of musical instrument playing in adulthood (r = 0.07 to 0.29) but not the frequency of music listening. These findings suggest that early music engagement is a dynamic phenotype that changes considerably between childhood, adolescence, and beyond. This work highlights the need for a developmental perspective in theoretical models of music engagement and its relation to language, cognition, and health.