Growing Up in the Digital Age

For this month’s #freshfromthelab we are going to be chatting about Professor Rachel Barr’s (Georgetown University) work on how young children learn from media, and what caregivers can do to promote learning.

Media is everywhere in a growing child’s life – child friendly tablet and smartphone games, child-directed TV programmes and even picture books are all considered as types of media. But how do young children learn from these resources, and how do they apply what they have learnt to the real world around them? Understanding this topic is important now more than ever given the ongoing COVID pandemic. A recent USA survey found over half of caregivers said that since the start of the pandemic their child’s screen time had increased by 50% - likely due to a combination of drastic changes to childcare arrangements and home-schooling all whilst parents try to jungle other commitments such as work and household management.

But should we be worried about this increase in screen time and its impact on the next generation’s learning? Short answer: no, providing they have an adult’s helping hand to guide them through the process.

Learning from media during early childhood is limited. Media often doesn’t provide all of the same information that the real world does. A TV programme would likely only provide 2D visual and auditory information. TV also lacks contingent social interaction - the person on the TV cannot respond to your child so, for example, learning how to respond correctly to social cues is limited.

Young children also have difficulties with their own memory flexibility. Young children find it difficult to transfer the knowledge learnt in one form to another – a topic we’ve already covered in ‘Movement: Practice Makes Perfect’ where kids learning to walk would make the same mistakes they had done when learning to crawl. The same goes for transferring knowledge from one media form (e.g. TV) to the real world – something that when not done well we call transfer deficit.

In an ingenious experiment, Professor Barr and her colleagues tested this transfer deficit with a group of 2-3-year-old participants. First, the toddlers were taught a simple puzzle where they had to rearrange shapes on either a magnetic board (real life) or on a tablet (media). In the next stage of the experiment, the young children had to re-create the puzzle that had previously been shown, either with the same or opposite device (magnet board or tablet). The children who learnt and did the puzzle using the same device did the best. Those children who had to do the puzzle with the opposite device had a much larger transfer deficit and preformed relatively poorly on the puzzle task.

But fear not! Like I said earlier, all these little ones needed was a helping hand from their caregiver. When Professor Barr introduced parents to the learning stage of the puzzle task, there was a huge improvement in the ability to transfer what had been learnt from one device with their caregiver to the opposite device. Looking a little more closely at the interactions that were happening between caregiver and child during the learning stage of the task, Professor Barr and colleagues concluded that the caregiver’s joint media engagement was likely supporting the child’s learning process. As adults, we readily do this joint media engagement when showing a picture book to a child. We provide structuring to the learning process by drawing attention to what is important in the book (e.g., pointing at objects or saying something along the lines of “Oh, look at the pretty flower”). We elaborate on the information that is there (e.g., “Look at the cat! He looks like our cat!”). We also provide reassurance (e.g., cuddling) and reward (e.g. “well done!”). All these things are essential for your little one when they are learning. But Professor Barr explains that caregivers often don’t participate in these forms of joint media engagement for media involving touchscreens as they feel all the information the child requires is already there. But as Professor Barr demonstrated it’s not, and children learn best with this media form when guided by a caregiver in a supportive manner. Check out this video for a summary of Professor Barr’s findings when the same age-tailored study is conducted with 15-month old toddler – they also needed parent support in the learning process!

Professor Barr also pointed out that this joint media engagement doesn’t have to be 100% of the time! But every little helps. Why not check out Screen Sense – a FREE science-backed resource pack full of tips and tricks for helping you and your little ones make the most of screen-based media.

So, next time your little one is engrossed in their media of choice maybe try to get involved – point things out, ask questions, and elaborate on what information is provided there. If nothing else, it’s a great bonding exercise and a welcome excuse to disengage from reality for a short while! Check out our app for other activities you and your little one can do together.

Movement: Practice Makes Perfect

In this month's #Freshfromthelab, we will tell you about Professor Adolf work on movement acquisition in infants.

Babies move. They wriggle, they squirm, they kick. And the fact they do these things from as early as prenatally, points towards the critical role movement plays in development. Professor Adolf from New York University’s department of psychology tells us that movement is the foundation of wider learning. It allows infants to explore their everyday environment and opens new opportunities for perception, cognition, and social interaction.

From the day they are born, babies are growing at extraordinary speed. Within the first year of life, babies grow on average 10 inches and triple their birthweight. Moving with this rapidly changing body requires behavioural flexibility. Acquiring this flexibility also puts them in good stead to deal with a number of challenges related to efficient movement, such as selecting and modifying ongoing appropriate actions to suit a varying environment. Just think, when your toddler is traversing the living-room they might first crawl over to the sofa to cruise its length, then take a few steps before landing on their bum to crawl the remaining distance to the toy they intended to get. This range of movement requires on-the-fly changes to adapt to what is available to help them on their way in their ever-expanding environment.

Much like anything else, acquiring flexibility requires lots of practice and experience. With an ingenious study design, Professor Adolf demonstrated the effect experience has on movement in action. When placing 12-month old novice walkers on top of a platform with a steep 90cm drop, 50% of infants will literally walk off the edge (before mum/dad swiftly catches them). When the infant is 18-months they are experienced. They know they are too small to safely walk down the very steep drop. So, they get on their bum and shuffle down. This is flexibility - they knew their body wasn’t up for the drop while walking so they changed their movement to accommodate.

Interestingly, Professor Adolf demonstrated that this flexibility isn’t transferred to other skills. If an infant learns from experience something is too steep to crawl down, they will likely still try to walk down it if they are novice walkers. A new skills means new information needs to be gathered. More practice needs to be done.

Babies have a “try, try and try again” attitude when it comes to learning to move. Falling is all part of the practice – and babies are the prefect fallers. They aren’t very high off the ground in the first place, and they have squishy bodies padded with baby fat that cushions the blow. 91% of infant falls are uneventful, and on average infants recover from falls within 2 seconds. Infants aren’t put off learning to walk because they fell over, they just get back up and keep trying. This mentality is something we could (re)learn from our little ones and implement in our challenging adult lives – a notion touched upon by Silvia in her post this month.

Check out our Babybrains app for some movement activities to do with your little one as they are developing.

Talking Babytalk!

Ever noticed how when you speak to your little one you use a different voice? Often higher pitched, slower, repetitive and rhythmic in a “sing-song” kind of way? Well, that babytalk, or what we in developmental science call infant-directed speech, is observed in cultures across the globe and is thought to be a consequence of evolution. Being part of our evolutionary profile infant-directed speech needs to have an adaptive purpose. It needs to increase the survival of our offspring. So, what is the purpose of infant-directed speech?

Historically, infant-directed speech has been considered to help with infant emotional regulation. Just think, you’ll often use this way of talking a little more when you are soothing your child. But actually, a recent resurgence in the study of infant-directed speech is shedding new light on its role in infant cognitive development. At this year’s International Congress of Infant Studies, Professor Goldstein from Cornell University summarised his recent findings on the contributions of both Infant directed speech and infant directed movement on infant word learning.

In the process of learning new words, your infant must overcome not only cognitive challenges (the mental capacity to acquire the knowledge) but also attentional challenges (staying engaged long enough to the appropriate stimuli to put two and two together). Overcoming the latter is of upmost importance for efficient word learning, and is a possibly an evolutionary purpose of infant-directed speech and movement. We as caregivers direct our little one’s attention to objects in the environment in a baby-friendly manner whilst labelling objects, ultimately facilitating word learning. Studies demonstrate infant-direct speech not only to go above and beyond normal (or adult directed speech) for engaging attention to but it also sensitizes infants to stimuli they have become habituated it. This means that when an object is no longer new to an infant, they will become habituated and spend less time looking at it. But when infant-directed speech occurs whilst presenting this habituated stimuli to the infant, looking time increases, even when the infant directed speech no longer occurs. The infant has become sensitized and dishabituated to the object – they will start paying attention to the object again. This is not the case for adult-directed speech where once the speech no longer occurs, the infant will disengage with the object. These findings highligh the importance of infant directed speech in directing and sustaining infant attention to the environment.

In addition to infant-directed speech for manipulating infant attention, the way we move or position objects in the environment (infant directed movement) plays a key role in word learning. For example, if you and your baby are playing with a stuffed toy, you’d likely move the toy around them in an exaggerated way, often in time with the rhythm of your Babytalk. These behaviours that often do naturally without much thought play guide the infant’s attention to objects in the environment as well as enable the association between visual and auditory stimuli – all of which is crucial for accurate word learning. By moving the toy in an engaging manner, whilst engagingly talking about the toy (often repeating the toys name), the child will quickly pick up on the association between the toy and the toy’s name.

Demonstrating the importance of infant directed movement alongside infant directed speech, Professor Goldstein developed a training and comprehension study testing the effects of infant directed behaviours on infant word learning at 13-months. During the training phase of the study, infants would be presented with a new object. The researcher would then label this new object with a new word. For example, the researcher would say “Here is a Dax. Look at the Dax. It is a Dax” while holding and moving a toy the child had never seen before. “Dax” being the new word and the toy being the new object. The researcher would either use infant directed speech or monotonic adult directed speech combined with either infant directed movement of the toy or no movement of the toy; giving us four combinations (or conditions) to which the infant participant was assigned. Once they had undergone the training, the infant’s word/object comprehension was tested, both immediately after the training and then 24 hours later. To assess if the infant had learnt the word/object, they were asked in the type speech in which they were trained (IDS or adult directed speech) to place the new object (which was presented on the table in front of them alongside another object) in a basket.

Interestingly, results demonstrated that for both the immediate and 24-hour delayed comprehension task the infant’s word/object learning was not influenced by the type of speech they were exposed to during training. Infants learnt the new word equally well with infant directed speech and adult directed speech. But, when the infant was exposed to infant directed speech and no movement of the toy, they performed worse on the compression task than all other combinations of training. What Professor Goldstein thinks is going on here is that infant directed speech is drawing the infant’s attention to the speakers face and social cues. Without the addition of infant directed movement, the infant will not attend to the object and ultimately will not learn the name of the object as well.

So, next time catch yourself speaking in that high pitch voice, remember you’re doing something awesome! You’re directly contributing to your baby’s development!

For more information on infant directed speech, check out this awesome video summary from Dr Marina Kalashnikova from the BabyLab at Western Sydney University.