Learning and retention in 3- and 6-month-old infants: A comparison of different experimental paradigms

Measurement of Cognition for the National Children's Study

The National Children's Study Cognitive Health Domain Team developed detailed plans for assessing cognition longitudinally from infancy to early adulthood. These plans identify high-priority aspects of cognition that can be measured efficiently and effectively, and we believe they can serve as a model for future large-scale longitudinal research. For infancy and toddlerhood, we proposed several paradigms that collectively allowed us to assess six broad cognitive constructs: (1) executive function skills, (2) episodic memory, (3) language, (4) processing speed, (5) spatial and numerical processing, and (6) social cognition. In some cases, different trial sequences within a paradigm allow for the simultaneous assessment of multiple cognitive skills (e.g., executive function skills and processing speed). We define each construct, summarize its significance for understanding developmental outcomes, discuss the feasibility of its assessment throughout development, and present our plan for measuring specific skills at different ages. Given the need for well-validated, direct behavioral measures of cognition that can be used in large-scale longitudinal studies, especially from birth to age 3 years, we also initiated three projects focused on the development of new measures.

African Versus Caucasian Faces in a Visual Expectation Paradigm

This article focuses on sequence learning on the Visual Expectation Paradigm (VExP) using human faces as stimulus material. For a sample of 133 Caucasian German infants assessed longitudinally at 3 and 6 months of age, a previous study has shown that the response latency of 6-month-old infants was shorter when the infants solved the task with Caucasian own-race faces in contrast to African other-race faces. The advantage for own-race faces occurs at the same age the Other-Race-Effect (ORE) has been reported to emerge. As studies on ORE development have shown the phenomenon in infants from various cultural backgrounds, the follow-up question to be answered here is whether the performance differences on the VExP can also be found in other than Caucasian infants. As a complement to the German sample, 30 African infants from Cameroon were assessed longitudinally with the same VExP task at ages 3 and 6 months. Our results indicate that perception differences between own-race and other-race faces influence performance on the VExP in both samples. As expected, the Cameroonian infants improved performance on the VExP from 3 to 6 months only in their own-race African faces condition.