cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.17910/b7.89
title: The cost of simplifying complex developmental phenomena: A new perspective on learning to walk

description: Researchers can study complex developmental phenomena with all the inherent noise and complexity or simplify behaviors to hone in on the essential aspects of a phenomenon. We used the development of walking as a model system to compare the costs and benefits of simplifying a complex, noisy behavior. Traditionally, researchers simplify infant walking by recording gait measures as infants take continuous, forward steps along straight paths. Here, we compared the traditional straight-path task with spontaneous walking during 20 minutes of free play in 97 infants (10.75–19.82 months of age). We recorded infants’ footfalls on an instrumented floor to calculate gait measures in the straight-path and free-play tasks. In addition, we scored videos for other critical aspects of spontaneous walking—steps per bout, shape of walking path, and step direction. Studying infant walking during free play incurred no cost compared with the straight-path task, but considerable benefits. Straight-path gait was highly correlated with spontaneous gait and both sets of measures improved with walking age, validating use of the straight-path task as an index of development. However, a large proportion of free-play bouts were too short to permit standard gait measures, and most bouts were curved with omnidirectional steps. The high prevalence of these “non-canonical” bouts was constant over development. We propose that focus on spontaneous walking, the phenomenon we ostensibly wish to explain, yields important insights into the problems infants solve while learning to walk. Other areas of developmental research may also benefit from retaining the complexity of complex phenomena.
DOI: 10.17910/b7b885
title: Word-minimality, Epenthesis and Coda Licensing in the Early Acquisition of English

description: Katherine Demuth and her research assistants at Brown University compiled the Providence corpus from 2002-2005. The corpus contains longitudinal audio/video recordings of 6 monolingual English-speaking children’s language development from 1-3 years during spontaneous interactions with their parents (usually their mothers) at home. The aim of the study was to provide a corpus of phonetically transcribed data, with linked acoustic files, for the purpose of studying early phonological and morphological development. Collection and transcription of the Providence Corpus (and the similar Lyon Corpus for French) was supported by NIMH grant #1ROIMH60922. Participants The participants included 3 boys (Alex, Ethan, William) and 3 girls (Lily, Naima, Violet). Each child was recorded for 1 hour every 2 weeks beginning at the onset of first words. Two of the children have denser corpora, with weekly recordings from 1;3-2;10 (Naima) and 2;0-3;0 (Lily). The three girls (Lily, Naima, and Violet) were also recorded monthly from 3-4 years. The total corpus consists of 364 hours of speech. Audio is available for all children and video is available for all children except Ethan, who was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome at the age of 5. Transcription Both adult and child utterances were orthographically transcribed using CLAN conventions, with the audio/video files linked. Trained transcribers then carried out a broad phonemic (SAMPA &gt; Unicode) transcription of the child utterances. A second trained coder then retranscribed 10% of each recording. Reliability scores ranged from 80%-98% (discounting voicing errors) on this second segment. Published by Childes Talkbank as "Phonbank English Providence Corpus". The use of TalkBank data is governed by a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License.
DOI: 10.17910/b76k5w
title: Semantic congruity affects numerical judgments similarly in monkeys and humans

description: Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) were trained to order visual arrays based on their number of elements and to conditionally choose the array with the larger or smaller number of elements dependent on a color cue. When the screen background was red, monkeys were reinforced for choosing the smaller numerical value first. When the screen background was blue, monkeys were reinforced for choosing the larger numerical value first. Monkeys showed a semantic congruity effect analogous to that reported for human comparison judgments. Specifically, decision time was systematically influenced by the semantic congruity between the cue (“choose smaller” or “choose larger”) and the magnitude of the choice stimuli (small or large numbers of dots). This finding demonstrates a semantic congruity effect in a nonlinguistic animal and provides strong evidence for an evolutionarily primitive magnitude-comparison algorithm common to humans and monkeys.
DOI: 10.17910/b72s3z
title: Training the Approximate Number System Improves Math Proficiency

description: Humans share with nonhuman animals an approximate number system (ANS) that permits estimation and rough calculation of number without symbols. Recent studies show a correlation between the acuity of the ANS and symbolic math performance throughout development and into adulthood, suggesting that the ANS may serve as a cognitive foundation for the uniquely human capacity for symbolic mathematics. Such a proposition leads to the untested prediction that training aimed at improving ANS performance will transfer to improvement in symbolic mathematics. Here, in two experiments, we show that ANS training on approximate addition and subtraction of arrays of dots, selectively improves symbolic addition and subtraction. This finding strongly supports the hypothesis that complex math skills are fundamentally linked to rudimentary preverbal quantitative abilities, provides the first direct evidence that ANS and symbolic math may be causally related, and raises the possibility that interventions aimed at the ANS could benefit children and adults who struggle with math.
DOI: 10.17910/b7z300
title: Absence of Construct Validity in Standard False Belief Tasks

description: False belief tasks are used to assess theory of mind in infants, young children, individuals with autism, and chimpanzees. However, the construct validity of the tasks has not been established because it is possible to pass the tasks without attributing a false belief to the agent. The standard tasks have two response options, one corresponding to the agent's false belief and the other corresponding to the current real state of affairs. Children could simply reason that the agent cannot see the current real state of affairs, thus the agent does not know, and thus the agent will "get it wrong." Because the only "wrong" option in the standard tasks is also the false belief option, children using this reasoning would choose the false belief option by default. Fabricius and Khalil (2003) labeled this "perceptual access reasoning" (PAR) and tested it using 3-option versions of the false belief tasks where there were two "wrong" options: the false belief option and an irrelevant option. PAR predicts that young children who pass the standard, 2-option false belief tasks would choose randomly between the false belief and irrelevant options in the 3-option tasks. Fabricius and Khalil (2003) found evidence in favor of PAR; however, Perner and Horn (2003), found evidence against it and in favor of the validity of the false belief tasks. We conducted seven replication attempts (N = 165) using Perner and Horn’s methods, and we employed the "continuously cumulating meta-analytic” (CCMA) approach to supply a test of replication with high power. We found strong evidence that Perner and Horn's original findings failed to replicate, but Fabricius and Khalil's original findings did replicate, casting serious doubt on the validity of the standard false belief tasks. The videos and the data from the 7th study are presented here. The procedures from the other six studies are presented in the materials section. The video below shows a 4-year-old passing the standard, 2-option Typical box ("Smarties") false belief task but, in accord with PAR, passing one of the three 3-option tasks (Neutral box) and choosing the irrelevant alternatives in the other two 3-option tasks (Location and Typical box).
DOI: 10.17910/b7t88h
title: Faces in early visual environments of infants

description: We sampled images from infant-perspective scenes captured by head cameras placed on infants' heads. This dataset contains codes that describe the physical properties of faces in these images.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.101
title: Head-camera study of novel word learning with 8-, 12-, and 16-month olds

description: Data from headcamera video studies conducted in the Stanford Language and Cognition Lab. Videos comprise a dataset for a project currently in progress.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.108
title: Facial expressions in 4-month-olds in the still face paradigm and later attachment at 12 months in the Strange Situation

description: Four-month-old infants and their parents were video-recorded in the Face-to-Face/Still-Face (FFSF) procedure (Adamson & Frick, 2003). Infants sat in a seat and their parents sat across from them. Parents and infants engaged in 2 minutes of natural positive interaction, then 2 minutes of parent still-face in which parents were asked to not respond to their infants, and then 2 minutes of renewed interaction. At 12 months, these infants and parents then completed the Strange Situation to assess attachment security, which consists of a series of separations and reunions.
DOI: 10.17910/b7pk57
title: Classroom discourse in elementary school engineering lessons

description: We are studying discourse among elementary school teachers and children who are engaged in engineering lessons. Over 3000 videos are being filmed as part of an NSF-funded DRK12 efficacy study of Engineering is Elementary. The PI is Christine Cunningham, Museum of Science Boston.
DOI: 10.17910/b7js39
title: From faces to hands: Changing visual input in the first two years

description: Human development takes place in a social context. Two pervasive sources of social information are faces and hands. Here, we provide the first report of the visual frequency of faces and hands in the everyday scenes available to infants. These scenes were collected by having infants wear head cameras during unconstrained everyday activities. Our corpus of 143 hours of infant-perspective scenes, collected from 34 infants aged 1 month to 2 years, was sampled for analysis at 1/5 Hz. The major finding from this corpus is that the faces and hands of social partners are not equally available throughout the first two years of life. Instead, there is an earlier period of dense face input and a later period of dense hand input. At all ages, hands in these scenes were primarily in contact with objects and the spatio-temporal co-occurrence of hands and faces was greater than expected by chance. The orderliness of the shift from faces to hands suggests a principled transition in the contents of visual experiences and is discussed in terms of the role of developmental gates on the timing and statistics of visual experiences.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.114
title: The development of tool use: Planning for end-state comfort.

description: Some grips on the handle of a tool can be planned on the basis of information directly available in the scene. Other grips, however, must be planned on the basis of the final position of the hand. “End-state comfort” grips require an awkward or uncomfortable initial grip so as to later implement the action comfortably and efficiently. From a cognitive perspective, planning for end-state comfort requires a consistent representation of the entire action sequence, including the latter part, which is not based on information directly available in the scene. Many investigators have found that young children fail to demonstrate planning for end-state comfort and that adultlike performance does not appear until about 12 years of age. In 2 experiments, we used a hammering task that engaged children in a goal-directed action with multiple steps. We assessed end-state-comfort planning in novel ways by measuring children’s hand choice, grip choice, and tool implementation over multiple trials. The hammering task also uniquely allowed us to assess the efficiency of implementation. We replicated the previous developmental trend in 4-, 8-, and 12-year-old children with our novel task. Most important, our data revealed that 4-year-olds are in a transitional stage during which several competing strategies were exhibited during a single session. Preschoolers changed their grip within trials and across trials, indicating awareness of errors and a willingness to sacrifice speed for more efficient implementation. The end-state-comfort grip initially competes as one grip type among many but gradually displaces all others. Children’s sensitivity to costs and drive for efficiency may motivate this change.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.116
title: Understanding the development of motion processing by characterizing optic flow experienced by infants and their mothers

description: Understanding the development of mature motion processing may require knowledge about the statistics of the visual input that infants are exposed to, how these change across development, and how they influence the maturation of motion-sensitive brain networks. Here we develop a set of techniques to study the optic flow experienced by infants and mothers during locomotion as a first step toward a broader analysis of the statistics of the natural visual environment during development.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.119
title: A-n-T: Attention and Temperament in Infancy

description: This study examines the way attention may be linked to temperament and emotional behavior from the first years of life. Children ages 4-months to 24-months with a variety of temperaments will be included in the study. Infants will view pictures of faces and a children's video in order to examine patterns of attention. We will use state-of-the-art eye-tracking equipment to assess where the infants are looking. Infants will also play with a variety of objects and toys as a part of a standard assessment of temperament. These data will will allow us to see how patterns of visual attention may be associated with social and emotional behavior over time. Since this is a multi-step study, participating families will be paid for their time and effort.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.121
title: Excerpt volume: Gibson's “visual cliff”

description: This simple apparatus is used to investigate depth perception in different animals. All species thus far tested seem able to perceive and avoid a sharp drop as soon as they can move about.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.123
title: Active vision in passive locomotion: Real-world free viewing in infants and adults

description: Visual exploration in infants and adults has been studied using two very different paradigms: free viewing of flat screen displays in desk-mounted eye-tracking studies and real-world visual guidance of action in head-mounted eye-tracking studies. To test whether classic findings from screen-based studies generalize to real-world visual exploration and to compare natural visual exploration in infants and adults, we tested observers in a new paradigm that combines critical aspects of both previous techniques: free viewing during real-world visual exploration. Mothers and their 9-month-old infants wore head-mounted eye trackers while mothers carried their infants in a forward-facing infant carrier through a series of indoor hallways. Demands for visual guidance of action were minimal in mothers and absent for infants, so both engaged in free viewing while moving through the environment. Similar to screen-based studies, during free viewing in the real world low-level saliency was related to gaze direction. In contrast to screen-based studies, only infants - not adults - were biased to look at people, participants of both ages did not show a classic center bias, and mothers and infants did not display high levels of inter-observer consistency. Results indicate that several aspects of visual exploration of a flat screen display do not generalize to visual exploration in the real world.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.124
title: Head-mounted eye tracking: A new method to describe infant looking

description: Despite hundreds of studies describing infants’ visual exploration of experimental stimuli, researchers know little about where infants look during everyday interactions. The current study describes the first method for studying visual behavior during natural interactions in mobile infants. Six 14-month-old infants wore a head-mounted eye-tracker that recorded gaze during free play with mothers. Results revealed that infants’ visual exploration is opportunistic and depends on the availability of information and the constraints of infants’ own bodies. Looks to mothers’ faces were rare following infant-directed utterances, but more likely if mothers were sitting at infants’ eye level. Gaze toward the destination of infants’ hand movements was common during manual actions and crawling, but looks toward obstacles during leg movements were less frequent.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.135
title: See and be seen: Infant-caregiver social looking during locomotor free play

description: Face-to-face interaction between infants and their caregivers is a mainstay of developmental research. However, common paradigms for studying infant-caregiver interaction oversimplify the act of social looking by placing infants and caregivers in stationary positions facing each other. In more naturalistic settings, infants and caregivers must coordinate movements of their bodies and heads to look at each another amid the demands of other ongoing actions. We hypothesized that social looking for each member of the dyad would be affected by 1) the motor costs of looking and 2) competition between the social partner’s face and other visual targets. To test these hypotheses, twelve-month-old infants and their parents wore head-mounted eye trackers to provide a moment-by-moment measure of whether each member of the dyad looked at the other’s face or looked at toys. Findings revealed that motor costs did affect looking: Social looking varied according to the body posture of infants and caregivers. Transitions between postures changed the likelihood of face looking by altering the observer’s viewpoint and the availability of the social partner’s face. Moreover, the presence of other visual targets greatly impacted infants’ but not caregivers’ social looking: Infants rarely looked at their parents’ faces but often looked at toys. In contrast, parents frequently looked at both infants’ faces and toys.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.136
title: What infants know and what they do: Perceiving possibilities for walking through openings.

description: What infants decide to do does not necessarily reflect the extent of what they know. In the current study, 17-month-olds were encouraged to walk through openings of varying width under risk of entrapment. Infants erred by squeezing into openings that were too small and became stuck, suggesting that they did not accurately perceive whether they could fit. However, a second penalty condition revealed accurate action selection when errors resulted in falling, indicating that infants are indeed perceptually sensitive to fitting through openings. Furthermore, independent measures of perception were equivalent between the two penalty conditions, suggesting that differences in action selection resulted from different penalties, not lack of perceptual sensitivity.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.139
title: Fostering Children’s Reasoning about Disagreements through an Inquiry-based Curriculum (time point 1)

description: This is the first testing session in a longitudinal study looking into children's scientific reasoning skills and metacognition. Tasks: diagnostic reasoning task, disagreement task, open-ended question about science Population: kindergarteners and first graders in a middle-class suburban school district
DOI: 10.17910/b7.140
title: It's the journey, not the destination: Locomotor exploration in infants

description: What incites infant locomotion? Recent research suggests that locomotor exploration is not primarily directed toward reaching distant people, places or things. We asked whether a room with toys designed to encourage movement (stroller, ball, etc.) elicits more locomotor exploration than a room with no toys. Surprisingly, 15-month-old infants produced the same quantity of locomotion in both rooms—even though most walking bouts involved toys when available. Our findings suggest that mere space to move is sufficient to elicit locomotion. However, the quality of locomotor exploration differed. Infants in the toy condition explored a larger percent of the room, and spent a smaller percent of the session within 100 cm of their caregiver. Thus, while not required to elicit locomotion, the presence of alluring destinations seem to encourage infants to travel to new and unexplored areas.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.150
title: Preschoolers' extension and export of information from realistic and fantastical stories (Study 2)

description: These studies investigate how children extend information within the context of fictional stories, how they export information from stories to reality, and whether these processes are affected by the story’s degree of realism. Preschool-aged children heard a story and judged whether events that happened at one point in that story could happen later in the story and could happen in real life.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.162
title: Visual, manual, and postural coordination in the development of prehension

description: Using a dynamic reaching paradigm and recording technologies, the aim of this study is to describe the real-time cascade of postural, exploratory, and performatory movements that comprise typical manual actions, and to understand how these sequential and simultaneous components unfold over development. The study uses computerized video analysis, head-mounted eye tracking, high resolution motion tracking, and a motorized chair apparatus to study how infants coordinate body posture, eye movements and performatory reach-to-grasp movements under various conditions of ongoing movement. Infant data are compared to a sample of healthy young adults.
DOI: 10.17910/b7.163
title: What cruising infants understand about support for locomotion

description: "Cruising" infants can only walk using external support to augment their balance. We examined cruisers' understanding of support for upright locomotion under four conditions: cruising over a wooden handrail at chest height, a large gap in the handrail, a wobbly unstable handrail, and an ill positioned low handrail. Infants distinguished among the support properties of the handrails with differential attempts to cruise and handrail-specific forms of haptic exploration and gait modifications. They consistently attempted the wood handrail, rarely attempted the gap, and occasionally attempted the low and wobbly handrails. On the wood and gap handrails, attempt rates matched the probability of cruising successfully; but on the low and wobbly handrails, attempt rates under- and over-estimated the probability of success, respectively. Haptic exploration was most frequent and varied on the wobbly handrail, and gait modifications-including previously undocumented "knee cruising"-were most frequent and effective on the low handrail. Results are discussed in terms of developmental changes in the meaning of support.