Teaching or Learning from Baby: Inducing Explicit Parenting Goals Influences Caregiver Intrusiveness

Parents’ goals influence their interactions with their children. In this pre-registered study, we examined whether directing parents to teach their baby versus learn from their baby influences the extent to which they engage in intrusive caregiving behavior. Mother¬s and their 6-month-old infants (N=66; 32 female infants) participated in a 10-minute “free play” interaction, coded in 2-minute epochs for degree of maternal intrusiveness. Prior to the final epoch, mothers were randomly assigned to receive instructions to focus on 1) teaching something to their infant; or 2) learning something from their infant. Analyses of within-person changes in intrusiveness from before to after receiving these instructions indicated that mothers assigned to teach their infant increased in intrusiveness, whereas mothers assigned to learn from their infant decreased in intrusiveness. Parents’ explicit goals regarding infant learning can lead to controlling and adult-centered caregiving behavior.

Quantifying Infant Exploratory Learning

Exploration is considered essential to infant learning, but few studies have quantified infants’ task exploration. The purpose of this study was to quantify how infants explored task space with their feet while learning to activate a kick-activated mobile. Data were analyzed from fifteen 4-month-old infants who participated in a 10-min mobile task on 2–3 consecutive days. Infants learned that their vertical leg movements above a systematically increased threshold height activated the mobile. Five kinematic variables were analyzed: (a) exploration space volume, (b) exploration path length, (c) duration of time in the region of interest around the threshold that activated the mobile, (d) task-specific vertical variance of kicks, and (e) non-task-specific horizontal variance of kicks. The infants increased their general spatial exploration, volume, and path, and the infants adapted their exploration by maintaining their feet within the region of interest, although the task-specific region increased in height as the threshold increased. The infants used task-specific strategies quantified by the increased variance of kicks in the vertical direction and no change in the horizontal variance of kicks. Quantifying infants’ task exploration may provide critical insights into how learning emerges in infancy and enable researchers to more systematically describe, interpret, and support learning.

It's More Complicated

Lifespan developmental psychology extends from birth to old age. I describe my research career from studies of newborns through childhood and adolescence to adulthood. I also include reflections from my aging brain on determinants of the life course especially in regard to risk and resilience. Infant learning, toddler temperament, and parental conceptions are highlighted content areas. A number of increasingly complex concepts from transactions to a unified theory are described to capture the ingredients that form development, requiring models of growth, context, regulation, and representation. I conclude by discussing applications to infant mental health and developmental disabilities.

The rhythm of learning: theta oscillations as an index of active learning in infancy

Active learning is a critical component of human development, however, the mechanisms supporting it are not fully understood. Given that early learning experiences may affect both infants' immediate learning success, as well as their motivation to learn, it is particularly important to investigate the mechanisms of active learning in this period, when the foundations of learning habits and curiosity are built. Traditional behavioural approaches of studying infant learning face challenges that emerging tools from neuroscience may help relieve. We introduce one such tool, EEG theta oscillations, and propose this neural marker has great potential for offering novel insights into active learning. Theta activity, recorded prior to or during learning, has been shown to be predictive of learning success. We argue that this involvement in memory formation, combined with theta activity’s tight association with reward processing, makes theta oscillations a uniquely suited tool for the investigation of motivational mechanisms underlying active learning. We outline research questions as well as methodological approaches pertinent to infant learning and suggest how and why theta oscillations may offer complementary insights. As such, we aim to bridge the gap between cognitive and neural approaches, and advance our knowledge of active learning in development more broadly.

Investigating Early Pre-implant Predictors of Language and Cognitive Development in Children with Cochlear Implants

Pre-implant predictors of language and cognitive outcomes in children with cochlear implants have been mostly limited to residual hearing and demographic variables. These variables have accounted for a limited portion of variance in outcomes and for the most part only in children who received cochlear implants from 3 to 5 years of age and later. With cochlear implantation now regularly occurring in the first year of life, there is new interest in identifying pre-implant variables with greater predictive value, including pre-implant measures of infant learning and behavior in the first 12 months. The search for pre-implant variables in the first year has been limited by the challenges inherent in assessing preverbal infants with little or no access to signed or spoken language. This review includes research on pre-implant predictors from a longitudinal study, behavioral measures in infants implanted at 12 months of age, and relevant research on early learning in hearing infants.