scholarly journals Online measures of looking and learning in infancy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Sierra Smith-Flores ◽  
Jasmin Perez ◽  
Michelle H. Zhang ◽  
Lisa Feigenson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Development Research ◽  
Laboratory Findings ◽  
Novel Object ◽  
Preferential Looking ◽  
Online Measures

Infants in laboratory settings look longer at impossible than possible events, learn better about objects that behave surprisingly, and match people’s utterances to the objects that likely elicited them. The paradigms that reveal these behaviors have become cornerstones of research on preverbal cognition. But less is known about whether these canonical behaviors generalize in naturalistic environments. Here we describe a series of online protocols that replicate classic laboratory findings, detailing our methods throughout. In Experiment 1, we found that 15-month-olds (N = 24) looked longer at an online impossible support event (an object appearing to defy gravity) than a possible support event. These infants did not, however, show the same success with an online solidity event. In Experiment 2, we found that 15-month-olds (N = 24) showed surprise-induced learning online—they were better able to learn a label for a novel object when the object had just behaved unexpectedly. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that 16-month-olds (N = 20) who heard a valenced utterance (“Yum!”) showed preferential looking to the object most likely to have generated that utterance. Together, these results suggest that, with some adjustments, testing infants online is a feasible and promising approach for cognitive development research.

scholarly journals Uh and euh signal novelty for monolinguals and bilinguals: Evidence from children and adults (PREPRINT)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Morin-Lessard ◽  
Krista Byers-Heinlein
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Novel Object ◽  
Preferential Looking ◽  
French Study ◽  
Phonetic Realization ◽  
English Monolingual

Previous research suggests that English monolingual children and adults can use speech disfluencies (e.g., uh) to predict that a speaker will name a novel object. To understand the origins of this ability, we tested 48 32-month-old children (monolingual English, monolingual French, bilingual English-French; Study 1) and 16 adults (bilingual English-French; Study 2). Our design leveraged the distinct realizations of English (uh) versus French (euh) disfluencies. In a preferential-looking paradigm, participants saw familiar-novel object pairs (e.g., doll-rel), labeled in either Fluent (“Look at the doll/rel!”), Disfluent Language-consistent (“Look at thee uh doll/rel!”), or Disfluent Language-inconsistent (“Look at thee euh doll/rel!”) sentences. All participants looked more at the novel object when hearing disfluencies, irrespective of their phonetic realization. These results suggest that listeners from different language backgrounds harness disfluencies to comprehend day-to-day speech, possibly by attending to their lengthening as a signal of speaker uncertainty. Stimuli and data are available at https://osf.io/qn6px/.

scholarly journals A gentle introduction to cognitive development research with Bayesian perspective

2015 ◽  
Vol 79 (0) ◽  
pp. SS-015-SS-015
Author(s):  
Yusuke Moriguchi ◽  
Naoya Todo ◽  
Shohei Hidaka ◽  
Tomoaki Nakamura ◽  
Hiroaki Suzuki ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Development Research

Mutual exclusivity and phonological novelty constrain word learning at 16 months

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 933-950 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMILY MATHER ◽  
KIM PLUNKETT
Keyword(s):  
Word Learning ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mutual Exclusivity ◽  
Novel Object ◽  
Preferential Looking ◽  
Novel Objects

ABSTRACTStudies report that infants as young as 1 ; 3 to 1 ; 5 will seek out a novel object in response to hearing a novel label (e.g. Halberda, 2003; Markman, Wasow & Hansen, 2003). This behaviour is commonly known as the ‘mutual exclusivity’ response (Markman, 1989; 1990). However, evidence for mutual exclusivity does not imply that the infant has associated a novel label with a novel object. We used an intermodal preferential looking task to investigate whether infants aged 1 ; 4 could use mutual exclusivity to guide their association of novel labels with novel objects. The results show that infants can successfully map a novel label onto a novel object, provided that the novel label has no familiar phonological neighbours. Therefore, as early as 1 ; 4, infants can use mutual exclusivity to form novel word–object associations, although this process is constrained by the phonological novelty of a label.

scholarly journals Retrospective inferences in selective trust

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 191451
Author(s):  
Friederike Schütte ◽  
Nivedita Mani ◽  
Tanya Behne
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Attentional Bias ◽  
Metacognitive Strategies ◽  
Novel Object ◽  
Object Selection ◽  
Conflicting Information ◽  
Preferential Looking ◽  
Selective Trust ◽  
The Future

Young children learn selectively from others based on the speakers' prior accuracy. This indicates that they recognize the models’ (in)competence and use it to predict who will provide the most accurate and useful information in the future. Here, we investigated whether 5-year-old children are also able to use speaker reliability retrospectively, once they have more information regarding their competence. They first experienced two previously unknown speakers who provided conflicting information about the referent of a novel label, with each speaker using the same novel label to refer exclusively to a different novel object. Following this, children learned about the speakers' differing labelling accuracy. Subsequently, children selectively endorsed the object–label link initially provided by the speaker who turned out to be reliable significantly above chance. Crucially, more than half of these children justified their object selection with reference to speaker reliability, indicating the ability to explicitly reason about their selective trust in others based on the informants’ individual competences. Findings further corroborate the notion that young children are able to use advanced, metacognitive strategies (trait reasoning) to learn selectively. By contrast, since learning preceded reliability exposure and gaze data showed no preferential looking toward the more reliable speaker, findings cannot be accounted for by attentional bias accounts of selective social learning.

scholarly journals Digital Games as a Context for Children's Cognitive Development: Research Recommendations and Policy Considerations

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fran C. Blumberg ◽  
Kirby Deater‐Deckard ◽  
Sandra L. Calvert ◽  
Rachel M. Flynn ◽  
C. Shawn Green ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Development Research ◽  
Research Recommendations
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document