Age-related changes in deferred imitation from television by 6- to 18-month-olds

The effect of picture book reading on young children's use of an emotion regulation strategy

Picture book reading is an enjoyable everyday activity for many young children with well-known benefits for language development. The present study investigated whether picture book reading can support young children's social-emotional development by providing a learning opportunity for the usage of emotion regulation strategies. Three-year-old children participated in two waiting situations designed to elicit negative affect. Between these waiting situations they read a picture book. In two experimental conditions, the book depicted how a protagonist (same-aged peer or young adult, respectively) waited for a desired object and distracted herself with toys while waiting. Children in an additional control condition read a picture book that was unrelated to waiting. Use of distraction did not differ between conditions. Parents often read picture book interactively with their children. Therefore, in an additional condition (Exp. 2), the experimenter read the picture book featuring the same-aged peer protagonist in an interactive way intended to facilitate transfer. Apart from the reading style, the design was identical to experiment 1. Experiment 2 intended to test whether changes in reading style lead to differences in three-year old children's social-emotional learning from picture books. When controlling for the children's picture book experience, children in the experimental conditions exhibited an increase in distraction in contrast to children in the control condition. In sum, results suggest that picture book reading could be an ecologically valid and versatile method for supporting 3-year-old children in their use of an age-appropriate adaptive emotion regulation strategies such as distraction.

Should I follow your virtual gaze? Infants' gaze following over video call

From 10 months of age, human infants start to understand the function of the eyes in the looking behavior of others to the point where they preferentially orient toward an object if the social partner has open eyes rather than closed eyes. Thus far, gaze following has been investigated in controlled laboratory paradigms. The current study investigated this early ability using a remote live testing procedure, testing infants in their everyday environment while manipulating whether the experimenter could or could not see some target objects. A total of 32 11- and 12-month-old infants' looking behavior was assessed, varying the experimenter's eye status condition (open eyes vs closed eyes) in a between-participant design. Results showed that infants followed the gaze of a virtual social partner and that they preferentially followed open eyes rather than closed eyes. These data generalize past laboratory findings to a noisier home environment and demonstrate gaze processing capacities of infants to a virtual partner interacting with the participants in a live setup.

Effects of screen exposure on young children's cognitive development: A review

The past decade has witnessed a rapid increase in the use of screen media in families, and infants are exposed to screens at younger ages than ever before. The objective of this review is twofold: (1) to understand the correlates and demographic factors determining exposure to screens, including interactive screens, when available, and (2) to study the effects of watching screens and using touchscreens on cognitive development, during the first 3 years of life. We argue that the effects of screen viewing depend mostly on contextual aspects of the viewing rather than on the quantity of viewing. That context includes the behavior of adult caregivers during viewing, the watched content in relation to the child's age, the interactivity of the screen and whether the screen is in the background or not. Depending on the context, screen viewing can have positive, neutral or negative effects on infants' cognition.

Can infants use video to update mental representations of absent objects?

Before their second birthday, infants can update their knowledge based on what someone tells them, but can they do so based on what a video shows them? The current study explored whether infants can update their representation of an absent object's properties after seeing a video of something happening to it, following seminal work showing that they can update their representation after being told about something happening to it (Ganea et al., 2007). It thus adapted an existing paradigm for testing infants' understanding of references to absent objects (using language) to investigate a different symbolic medium (video). Twenty-two-month-olds first played with a toy and later saw on video that the toy underwent a change in state while they were out of the room. Infants in the current study did not subsequently identify the toy based on this new information, whereas those in previous research did. Infants this age thus appear less likely to update their representation of an absent object's properties using video than using language. This result is consistent with the possibility that infants may understand the representational function of symbolic objects later in development than they understand the representational function of language. It also aligns with evidence of the video deficit in which infants learn less effectively from video than from firsthand experience.

Infant media use: A harm reduction approach

There are a myriad of potentially harmful developmental outcomes associated with infant digital media use. Studies revealing risk associated with early media use have informed the current American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommendations that discourage most digital media use among children under 18 months of age. Recent research advances, however, suggest potential benefits of technology engagement in this age group. Additionally, surveys of parents reveal that most infants engage with digital media for at least 30 min a day, exceeding the AAP recommendations. In response to these discoveries and cultural trends, some scholars have made compelling cases to adapt the AAP guidelines for infants. A helpful model for developing infant digital media use guidelines for families may be the harm reduction approach. The intent of this review is to suggest adaptations to the AAP guidelines for infant media engagement using a harm reduction framework. This review describes the challenge of restrictive guidelines, briefly summarizes the harm reduction approach, provides a review of risks and benefits associated with infant media use in each developmental domain (physical, cognitive, and socioemotional), summarizes correlates of infant screen media use, and examines intervention strategies for reducing screen time. The paper concludes with examples of possible adaptations to current AAP infant media use recommendations using harm reduction and bioecological frameworks.

The origins of touchscreen competence: Examining infants' exploration of touchscreens

Infants' exposure to images presented on screens is increasing with the accelerating use of technology in society and at home. Touchscreen technology provides numerous interactive screen opportunities geared toward infants and toddlers. Touchscreens are unique in that they possess the 2D qualities of a picture, but a set of manipulation possibilities similar to, but distinct from, a 3D object. Research comparing infants' manual exploration of photographs, objects, and screen images has demonstrated that although 7-10-month-old infants direct different actions towards 3D objects, their exploration of screen images does not differ significantly from their exploration of 2D photographs (Ziemer & Snyder, 2016). The current investigation compares the ways in which 7-10-month-old infants and 15-18-month-old infants manually explore screen images, photographs, and objects. Infants in the older age group were shown examples of objects, photographs, and screen images presented within a well in a table with a Plexiglas® cover to create identical tactile feedback. Coders noted the presence or absence of appropriate actions displayed toward the various surfaces. Results were compared to data collected earlier (Ziemer & Snyder, 2016) to demonstrate the evolution of touchscreen competence across the first years of infant development. By 15-18 months, infants demonstrate an emerging repertoire of touchscreen-appropriate behaviors directed towards touchscreens that is not demonstrated by 7-10-month-old infants. Differences in haptic exploration suggest the beginnings of a touchscreen competence that enables infants to understand and interact with touchscreens in a new way.

Social learning from media: The need for a culturally diachronic developmental psychology

Since the proliferation of television sets into households began over half a century ago there has been widespread interest in the impact that viewing has on young children's development. Such interest has grown with the increasing availability of smart phones and tablets. In this review we examine the literature documenting human social learning and how this learning is impacted when the instructing agent appears on a screen instead of face-to-face. We then explore the shifting nature of screen-based media, with a focus on the increasingly socio-normative manner information is portrayed. We discuss how the changing nature of screen technology might be altering how children interpret what they see, and raise the possibility that this may render prevailing evidence as historical documentation, rather than setting out established developmental milestones that transcend the period in which they were documented. We contend that recognizing the significance of historically changing contexts in developmental psychology is timely when the COVID-19 climate is pushing data collection on-line for many labs, often using tasks that were developed primarily for face-to-face contexts.

Social evaluation and imitation of prosocial and antisocial agents in infants, children, and adults

The question of whether infants prefer prosocial agents over antisocial agents is contentious. Therefore, the first goal of the present study was to replicate previous findings regarding infants' preference. The second goal was to assess whether infants are more likely to imitate a prosocial agent than an antisocial agent. We tested 9-month-old, 14-month-old, and 4-year-old children. The study used the "opening a box to get a toy" paradigm in which an animal puppet is trying unsuccessfully to open a box and is either helped by a prosocial puppet or hindered by an antisocial puppet. We presented these social events via video, and subsequently administered an imitation task. As an additional control, adults were asked to describe the videos showing the prosocial and antisocial agent. Although most adults were able to identify both agents, the three age groups of children did not prefer the prosocial agent over the antisocial agent, and were not more likely to imitate the prosocial agent. The lack of differences might be explained by methodological issues or by a lack of robustness of the effect.

Parental education, television exposure, and children's early cognitive, language and behavioral development

The association between television exposure and children's development is subject to controversial debates. Heavy television exposure may be detrimental to children by overstimulating their developing brains. It may also infringe on time that children would otherwise spend on more developmentally beneficial activities or parental interactions. In the present analysis, we use data from the 2004/5 birth cohort of the Growing Up in Scotland study to investigate relations between hours of weekly television measured around the ages of two to four and as average over this period with children's linguistic, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes around the age of five. Our analysis shows differences in the level and growth of television exposure by parental education. However, we did not find any substantive associations between television exposure and children's cognitive or language ability. We found small associations of television exposure with conduct problems and prosocial behavior, particularly for children of less-educated parents. Overall, the results suggest that the impact of television on children's development is less pronounced than often assumed.

Growing up in the digital age: Early learning and family media ecology

Media is so pervasive that it should no longer be considered a nuisance variable that could affect development but rather, a fundamental part of the context in which development occurs. Despite the rapid growth in access to digital media, there is a scarcity of research examining changes in the family media ecology and the subsequent effects of early media exposure on socio-cognitive development. Early research erroneously focused on the absolute amount of exposure by the child. Current research now considers the entire household, including both intentional exposure to child-directed content and unintended exposure to background media sources. Such research demonstrates that young children can and do learn from well-designed media particularly when they engage with others during digital play.

When Representation Becomes Reality: Interactive Digital Media and Symbolic Development

One challenge of using an interesting object such as a scale model as a symbol for something else is children's deep interest in the object itself. Attending to the model (the symbol) as a toy, children do not use information about where in the model a tiny dog is hiding to mentally represent where a larger dog is hiding in the full-sized room (the referent). Young children use pictures in this way because they are relatively uninteresting as objects. Today, interactive images on touchscreens function as virtual objects on which to act and which respond to the user's actions. In this chapter, we examine how interactive symbolic media (e.g., touchscreens, video chat, augmented reality) might affect children's symbolic development and the way that psychologists think about representational objects. Young children's learning about and from interactive media may depend upon adults scaffolding children's use of these new cultural tools.

The Effect of Social Responsiveness on Infants' Object-Directed Imitation

Previous research has demonstrated that social interactions underlie the development of object-directed imitation. For example, infants differentially learn object action sequences from a live social partner compared to a social partner over a video monitor; however, what is not well understood is what aspects of social interactions influence social learning. Previous studies have found variable influences of different types of caregiver responsiveness on attention, language, and cognitive development. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine how the responsive style of a social partner influenced the learning of object-directed action sequences. Infants interacted with either a sensitive or redirective experimenter before the learning trial. Results revealed infants changed their patterns of engagement; infants interacting with a sensitive experimenter had longer periods of attentional engagement than infants interacting with a redirective experimenter. Furthermore, during the learning trial, the amount of sensitivity during interaction with the social partner predicted learning scores. These findings suggest that infants' attention is influenced by social partners' interactive style during ongoing interaction, which subsequently affects how infants learn from these social partners.

Transitions in the temporal parameters of sensory preconditioning during infancy

Sensory preconditioning (SPC) is a form of latent learning in which preexposure to co-occurring neutral stimuli (S1 -S2 ) permits subsequent learning to be transferred from one stimulus (S1 ) to the other (S2 ). We examined whether human infants exhibit developmental transitions in the temporal parameters of SPC by manipulating the preexposure regimen. Infants received simultaneous or sequential preexposure to puppets S1 and S2 (Days 1-2); saw target actions modeled on S1 (Day 3); and were tested for deferred imitation with S2 (Day 4). Although 6-, 9-, and 12-month-olds associated the puppets, there was a shift in the effective regimen from simultaneous to sequential preexposure-similar to prior findings with rat pups (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 revealed that human infants potentially exhibit another transition in SPC at 15 and 18 months of age. We consider the roles of ontogenetic shifts in infants' ecological niche, selective attention, and unitization in developmental transitions in SPC.

Increased Screen Time: Implications for Early Childhood Development and Behavior

The authors review trends in adoption of new digital technologies (eg, mobile and interactive media) by families with young children (ages 0-8 years), continued use of television and video games, and the evidence for learning from digital versus hands-on play. The authors also discuss continued concerns about health and developmental/behavioral risks of excessive media use for child cognitive, language, literacy, and social-emotional development. This evidence is then applied to clinical care in terms of the screening questions providers can use, tools available to providers and parents, and changes in anticipatory guidance.

Young Children Learning from Touch Screens: Taking a Wider View

Touch screen devices such as smartphones and tablets are now ubiquitous in the lives of American children. These devices permit very young children to engage interactively in an intuitive fashion with actions as simple as touching, swiping and pinching. Yet, we know little about the role these devices play in very young children’s lives or their impact on early learning and development. Here we focus on two areas in which existing research sheds some light on these issues with children under 3 years of age. The first measures transfer of learning, or how well children use information learned from screens to reason about events off-screen, using object retrieval and word learning tasks. The second measures the impact of interactive screens on parent-child interactions and story comprehension during reading time. More research is required to clarify the pedagogical potential and pitfalls of touch screens for infants and very young children, especially research focused on capabilities unique to touch screens and on the social and cultural contexts in which young children use them.

Baby FaceTime: can toddlers learn from online video chat?

There is abundant evidence for the 'video deficit': children under 2 years old learn better in person than from video. We evaluated whether these findings applied to video chat by testing whether children aged 12-25 months could form relationships with and learn from on-screen partners. We manipulated social contingency: children experienced either real-time FaceTime conversations or pre-recorded Videos as the partner taught novel words, actions and patterns. Children were attentive and responsive in both conditions, but only children in the FaceTime group responded to the partner in a temporally synced manner. After one week, children in the FaceTime condition (but not the Video condition) preferred and recognized their Partner, learned more novel patterns, and the oldest children learned more novel words. Results extend previous studies to demonstrate that children under 2 years show social and cognitive learning from video chat because it retains social contingency. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/rTXaAYd5adA.

Do semantic contextual cues facilitate transfer learning from video in toddlers?

Young children typically demonstrate a transfer deficit, learning less from video than live presentations. Semantically meaningful context has been demonstrated to enhance learning in young children. We examined the effect of a semantically meaningful context on toddlers’ imitation performance. Two- and 2.5-year-olds participated in a puzzle imitation task to examine learning from either a live or televised model. The model demonstrated how to assemble a three-piece puzzle to make a fish or a boat, with the puzzle demonstration occurring against a semantically meaningful background context (ocean) or a yellow background (no context). Participants in the video condition performed significantly worse than participants in the live condition, demonstrating the typical transfer deficit effect. While the context helped improve overall levels of imitation, especially for the boat puzzle, only individual differences in the ability to self-generate a stimulus label were associated with a reduction in the transfer deficit.

Infants learn baby signs from video

There is little evidence that infants learn from infant-oriented educational videos and television programming. This 4-week longitudinal experiment investigated 15-month-olds' (N = 92) ability to learn American Sign Language signs (e.g., patting head for hat) from at-home viewing of instructional video, either with or without parent support, compared to traditional parent instruction and a no-exposure control condition. Forced-choice, elicited production, and parent report measures indicate learning across all three exposure conditions, with a trend toward more robust learning in the parent support conditions, regardless of medium. There were no differences between experimental and control conditions in the acquisition of corresponding verbal labels. This constitutes the first experimental evidence of infants' ability to learn expressive communication from commercially available educational videos.

Deconstructing the reactivation of imitation in young infants

Reactivation is an automatic, perceptual process in which exposure to components of a forgotten event alleviates forgetting. Most research on infant memory reactivation has used conditioning paradigms. We used the puppet imitation task to systematically examine which stimuli could retrieve 6-month-olds' forgotten memory of the modeled actions. Infants watched an adult model a sequence of actions on a puppet, imitated the actions, and were exposed to reactivation cues 24 hr before a 7-day (Experiment 1) or 14-day (Experiment 2) retention test. Exposure to any component of the original event reactivated the memory during the 7-day test, but two of the same components failed to alleviate forgetting during the 14-day test. Increasing the number of retrieval cues facilitated 14-day test performance. These findings reveal that the principles of reactivation are the same for conditioning and imitation paradigms: The necessary and sufficient conditions for memory reactivation are directly related to memory accessibility.

The relation between contingency preference and imitation in 6–8-month-old infants

Detecting self-generated actions and imitating other-generated actions are important abilities in order to interact with others. The relationship between these domains was investigated in 6–8-month-old infants. In a contingency-preference task, infants observed their own legs on a real-time and a delayed video display. In an imitation task, the experimenter demonstrated a three-step action directed at a puppet mouse. The Cognitive Scale of the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development was administered in order to control for the infants’ cognitive developmental status. A negative correlation was found between the proportion of time spent looking at the delayed display in the contingency-preference task and the imitation score in the imitation task. This indicates that the lower the infants’ preference for the delayed video image, the more likely they were to imitate. The correlation between contingency preference and imitation remained even after controlling for cognitive developmental status. Thus, a basic interest in high contingency might underlie the preference for observing self-generated actions and imitating other-generated actions.

Gibt es einen Videodefiziteffekt bei Aufgaben zur Theory of Mind?

Das Ziel der vorliegenden Studie bestand darin, einen möglichen Einfluss des Darbietungsmodus auf die Leistung von Vorschulkindern in einer Aufgabe zur Theory of Mind (ToM) zu überprüfen. Dazu wurden die Leistungen von 94 Kindern zwischen 3 und 5 Jahren in einer klassischen Ortsverlagerungsaufgabe zum Verständnis falscher Überzeugungen ( Wimmer & Perner, 1983 ) untersucht. Den Kindern wurde die Originalgeschichte entweder live oder als Videofilm präsentiert. Erstmalig konnte ein signifikanter Effekt des Darbietungsmodus in einer Aufgabe zur ToM nachgewiesen werden. Dieser ergab sich in der Altersgruppe der 4-Jährigen. Unabhängig vom Darbietungsmodus antworteten 3-Jährige überzufällig falsch und 5-Jährige überzufällig korrekt. Der nachgewiesene Effekt des Darbietungsmodus wird vor dem Hintergrund bereits bestehender Theorien zum sogenannten Videodefiziteffekt (VDE) diskutiert.

Annual research review: Towards a developmental neuroscience of atypical social cognition

As a starting point for our review we use a developmental timeline, starting from birth and divided into major developmental epochs defined by key milestones of social cognition in typical development. For each epoch, we highlight those developmental disorders that diverge from the normal developmental pattern, what is known about these key milestones in the major disorders affecting social cognition, and any available research on the neural basis of these differences. We relate behavioural observations to four major networks of the social brain, that is, Amygdala, Mentalizing, Emotion and Mirror networks. We focus on those developmental disorders that are characterized primarily by social atypicality, such as autism spectrum disorder, social anxiety and a variety of genetically defined syndromes. The processes and aspects of social cognition we highlight are sketched in a putative network diagram, and include: agent identification, emotion processing and empathy, mental state attribution, self-processing and social hierarchy mapping involving social ‘policing’ and in-group/out-group categorization. Developmental disorders reveal some dissociable deficits in different components of this map of social cognition. This broad review across disorders, ages and aspects of social cognition leads us to some key questions: How can we best distinguish primary from secondary social disorders? Is social cognition especially vulnerable to developmental disorder, or surprisingly robust? Are cascading notions of social development, in which early functions are essential stepping stones or building bricks for later abilities, necessarily correct?

Infant and adult visual attention during an imitation demonstration

Deferred imitation tasks have shown that manipulations at encoding can enhance infant learning and memory performance within an age, suggesting that brain maturation alone cannot fully account for all developmental changes in early memory abilities. The present study investigated whether changes in the focus of attention during learning might contribute to improving memory abilities during infancy. Infants aged 6, 9, and 12 months, and an adult comparison group, watched a video of a puppet imitation demonstration while visual behavior was recorded on an eye tracker. Overall, infants spent less time attending to the video than adults, and distributed their gaze more equally across the demonstrator and puppet stimulus. In contrast, adults directed their gaze primarily to the puppet. When infants were tested for their behavioral recall of the target actions, "imitators" were shown to have increased attention to the person and decreased attention to the background compared to "non-imitators." These results suggest that attention during learning is related to memory outcome and that changes in attention may be one mechanism by which manipulations to the learning event may enhance infant recall memory.

Is selective attention the basis for selective imitation in infants? An eye-tracking study of deferred imitation with 12-month-olds

Infants and children do not blindly copy every action they observe during imitation tasks. Research demonstrated that infants are efficient selective imitators. The impact of selective perceptual processes (selective attention) for selective deferred imitation, however, is still poorly described. The current study, therefore, analyzed 12-month-old infants' looking behavior during demonstration of two types of target actions: arbitrary versus functional actions. A fully automated remote eye tracker was used to assess infants' looking behavior during action demonstration. After a 30-min delay, infants' deferred imitation performance was assessed. Next to replicating a memory effect, results demonstrate that infants do imitate significantly more functional actions than arbitrary actions (functionality effect). Eye-tracking data show that whereas infants do not fixate significantly longer on functional actions than on arbitrary actions, amount of fixations and amount of saccades differ between functional and arbitrary actions, indicating different encoding mechanisms. In addition, item-level findings differ from overall findings, indicating that perceptual and conceptual item features influence looking behavior. Looking behavior on both the overall and item levels, however, does not relate to deferred imitation performance. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that, on the one hand, selective imitation is not explainable merely by selective attention processes. On the other hand, notwithstanding this reasoning, attention processes on the item level are important for encoding processes during target action demonstration. Limitations and future studies are discussed.

Relations between 18-month-olds' gaze pattern and target action performance: a deferred imitation study with eye tracking

Deferred imitation studies are used to assess infants' declarative memory performance. These studies have found that deferred imitation performance improves with age, which is usually attributed to advancing memory capabilities. Imitation studies, however, are also used to assess infants' action understanding. In this second research program it has been observed that infants around the age of one year imitate selectively, i.e., they imitate certain kinds of target actions and omit others. In contrast to this, two-year-olds usually imitate the model's exact actions. 18-month-olds imitate more exactly than one-year-olds, but more selectively than two-year-olds, a fact which makes this age group especially interesting, since the processes underlying selective vs. exact imitation are largely debated. The question, for example, if selective attention to certain kinds of target actions accounts for preferential imitation of these actions in young infants is still open. Additionally, relations between memory capabilities and selective imitation processes, as well as their role in shaping 18-month-olds' neither completely selective, nor completely exact imitation have not been thoroughly investigated yet. The present study, therefore, assessed 18-month-olds' gaze toward two types of actions (functional vs. arbitrary target actions) and the model's face during target action demonstration, as well as infants' deferred imitation performance. Although infants' fixation times to functional target actions were not longer than to arbitrary target actions, they imitated the functional target actions more frequently than the arbitrary ones. This suggests that selective imitation does not rely on selective gaze toward functional target actions during the demonstration phase. In addition, a post hoc analysis of interindividual differences suggested that infants' attention to the model's social-communicative cues might play an important role in exact imitation, meaning the imitation of both functional and arbitrary target actions.

Eye tracking infants: investigating the role of attention during learning on recognition memory

In the present study, eye tracker methodology was used to explore whether there were age-related changes in the focus of infant attention during a learning event and subsequent recognition memory for event features. Six- and 9-month old infants watched a video of an adult demonstrating a sequence of actions with an object while visual attention was recorded using an eye tracker. At both ages, attention was focused primarily on the object and person, with the background attended to for approximately 12% of their viewing time. Recognition memory for the person, object and background from the video was assessed immediately using a Visual Paired Comparison procedure. Despite focusing on the central features while watching the target video, infants showed only limited evidence of recognition memory for the individual components of the event. Taken together, these findings suggest that the early age-related changes in memory performance seen in the literature may not be the result of age-related changes in attentional focus during encoding.

15-month-olds' transfer of learning between touch screen and real-world displays: language cues and cognitive loads

Infants have difficulty transferring information between 2D and 3D sources. The current study extends Zack, Barr, Gerhardstein, Dickerson & Meltzoff's (2009) touch screen imitation task to examine whether the addition of specific language cues significantly facilitates 15-month-olds' transfer of learning between touch screens and real-world 3D objects. The addition of two kinds of linguistic cues (object label plus verb or nonsense name) did not elevate action imitation significantly above levels observed when such language cues were not used. Language cues hindered infants' performance in the 3D→2D direction of transfer, but only for the object label plus verb condition. The lack of a facilitative effect of language is discussed in terms of competing cognitive loads imposed by conjointly transferring information across dimensions and processing linguistic cues in an action imitation task at this age.

Systematic review of sedentary behaviour and health indicators in the early years (aged 0-4 years)

Accumulating evidence suggests that young children spend excessive time being sedentary. The purpose of this systematic review was to determine the relationship between sedentary behaviours and health indicators during the early years (ages 0-4 years). Using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) framework, this review aimed to present the best available evidence on the threshold of sedentary behaviour associated with healthy measures of adiposity, bone health, motor skill development, psychosocial health, cognitive development, and cardiometabolic health indicators in infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Online databases, personal libraries, and government documents were searched for relevant studies. Studies that included an intervention (or experimental) group or prospective analysis were included. Twenty-one unique studies, representing 23 papers and 22 417 participants, met inclusion criteria; 7 studies included information on infants, 13 on toddlers, and 10 on preschoolers. Of these, 11, 6, and 8 studies reported data on adiposity, psychosocial health, and cognitive development, respectively. No included study reported on motor skill development, bone, or cardiometabolic health indicators. In conclusion, this review found low- to moderate-quality evidence to suggest that increased television viewing is associated with unfavourable measures of adiposity and decreased scores on measures of psychosocial health and cognitive development. No evidence existed to indicate that television viewing is beneficial for improving psychosocial health or cognitive development. In several instances a dose-response relationship was evident between increased time spent watching television and decreased psychosocial health or cognitive development. This work may be used as evidence to inform public health guidelines. (PROSPERO registration: CRD4011001280.).

Age-related changes in learning across early childhood: a new imitation task

Imitation plays a critical role in social and cognitive development, but the social learning mechanisms contributing to the development of imitation are not well understood. We developed a new imitation task designed to examine social learning mechanisms across the early childhood period. The new task involves assembly of abstract-shaped puzzle pieces in an arbitrary sequence on a magnet board. Additionally, we introduce a new scoring system that extends traditional goal-directed imitation scoring to include measures of both children's success at copying gestures (sliding the puzzle pieces) and goals (connecting the puzzle pieces). In Experiment 1, we demonstrated an age-invariant baseline from 1.5 to 3.5 years of age, accompanied by age-related changes in success at copying goals and gestures from a live demonstrator. In Experiment 2, we applied our new task to learning following a video demonstration. Imitation performance in the video demonstration group lagged behind that of the live demonstration group, showing a protracted video deficit effect. Across both experiments, children were more likely to copy gestures at earlier ages, suggesting mimicry, and only later copy both goals and gestures, suggesting imitation. Taken together, the findings suggest that different social learning strategies may predominate in imitation learning dependent upon the degree of object affordance, task novelty, and task complexity.

Should babies be watching television and DVDs?

Should babies be watching television and DVDs? This is a reasonable question to ask but a difficult one to answer. This article reviews the theories and related research to examine what is known about infant media use. The review provides evidence both for and against each theory. The importance of infants learning how to watch and learn from screen media presentations is indicated and the new world of media to which babies are exposed is discussed.

The effect of narrative cues on infants' imitation from television and picture books

Infants can imitate a novel action sequence from television and picture books, yet there has been no direct comparison of infants' imitation from the 2 types of media. Varying the narrative cues available during the demonstration and test, the current experiments measured 18- and 24-month-olds' imitation from television and picture books. Infants imitated from both media types when full narrative cues (Experiment 1; N = 76) or empty, meaningless narration (Experiment 2; N = 135) accompanied the demonstrations, but they imitated more from television than books. In Experiment 3 (N = 27), infants imitated from a book based on narration alone, without the presence of pictures. These results are discussed in relation to age-related changes in cognitive flexibility and infants' emerging symbolic understanding.

Imitationsfähigkeit von Kleinkindern in den ersten beiden Lebensjahren

Zusammenfassung. Die Imitation repräsentiert eine wichtige kognitive und sozial-kognitive Fähigkeit in der frühen Kindheit. In den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten konzentrierte sich die Kleinkindforschung hauptsächlich auf die Untersuchung der verzögerten Imitation als nonverbales deklaratives Gedächtnismaß und der Imitation im Zusammenhang mit dem Intentionsverständnis. Ergebnisse von Längsschnittstudien zeigen zudem, dass individuelle Unterschiede in der verzögerten Imitationsleistung mit weiteren kognitiven, aber auch mit sprachlichen und sozialen Fertigkeiten assoziiert sind. Studien, die neue Präsentationsmedien (z.B. Videopräsentationen) nutzen, konnten bisherige Ergebnisse zu zugrunde liegenden kognitiven Prozessen bestätigen. Darüber hinaus erweitern sie unseren Kenntnisstand über die Bedeutung der sozialen Interaktion für das Imitationslernen. Für zukünftige Forschungsarbeiten zu diesem Thema ergibt sich, dass aufgrund der engen Beziehung zwischen dem Imitationsverhalten und anderen Fertigkeiten umfassendere Längsschnittstudien erforderlich sind, die individuelle Merkmale des Kindes, aber auch Merkmale seiner sozialen Umgebung in der Analyse der Imitation stärker berücksichtigen.

Randomized controlled trial of primary care pediatric parenting programs: effect on reduced media exposure in infants, mediated through enhanced parent-child interaction

OBJECTIVES

To determine whether pediatric primary care-based programs to enhance parenting and early child development reduce media exposure and whether enhanced parenting mediates the effects.

DESIGN

Randomized controlled trial.

SETTING

Urban public hospital pediatric primary care clinic.

PARTICIPANTS

A total of 410 mother-newborn dyads enrolled after childbirth.

INTERVENTIONS

Patients were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 interventions, the Video Interaction Project (VIP) and Building Blocks (BB) interventions, or to a control group. The VIP intervention comprised 1-on-1 sessions with a child development specialist who facilitated interactions in play and shared reading through review of videotapes made of the parent and child on primary care visit days; learning materials and parenting pamphlets were also provided. The BB intervention mailed parenting materials, including age-specific newsletters suggesting activities to facilitate interactions, learning materials, and parent-completed developmental questionnaires (Ages and Stages questionnaires).

OUTCOME MEASURES

Electronic media exposure in the home using a 24-hour recall diary.

RESULTS

The mean (SD) exposure at 6 months was 146.5 (125.0) min/d. Exposure to VIP was associated with reduced total duration of media exposure compared with the BB and control groups (mean [SD] min/d for VIP, 131.6 [118.7]; BB, 151.2 [116.7]; control, 155.4 [138.7]; P = .009). Enhanced parent-child interactions were found to partially mediate relations between VIP and media exposure for families with a ninth grade or higher literacy level (Sobel statistic = 2.49; P = .01).

CONCLUSION

Pediatric primary care may represent an important venue for addressing the public health problem of media exposure in young children at a population level.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00212576.

Infant media exposure and toddler development

OBJECTIVE

To determine whether duration and content of media exposure in 6-month-old infants are associated with development at age 14 months.

DESIGN

Longitudinal analysis of 259 mother-infant dyads participating in a long-term study related to early child development, from November 23, 2005, through January 14, 2008.

SETTING

An urban public hospital.

PARTICIPANTS

Mothers with low socioeconomic status and their infants.

MAIN EXPOSURE

Duration and content of media exposure at age 6 months.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Cognitive and language development at age 14 months.

RESULTS

Of 259 infants, 249 (96.1%) were exposed to media at age 6 months, with mean (SD) total exposure of 152.7 (124.5) min/d. In unadjusted and adjusted analyses, duration of media exposure at age 6 months was associated with lower cognitive development at age 14 months (unadjusted: r = -0.17, P < .01; adjusted: β = -0.15, P = .02) and lower language development (r = -0.16, P < .01; β = -0.16, P < .01). Of 3 types of content assessed, only 1 (older child/adult-oriented) was associated with lower cognitive and language development at age 14 months. No significant associations were seen with exposure to young child-oriented educational or noneducational content.

CONCLUSIONS

This study is the first, to our knowledge, to have longitudinally assessed associations between media exposure in infancy and subsequent developmental outcomes in children from families with low socioeconomic status in the United States. Findings provide strong evidence in support of the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations of no media exposure prior to age 2 years, although further research is needed.

Media as social partners: the social nature of young children's learning from screen media

Television has become a nearly ubiquitous feature in children's cultural landscape. A review of the research into young children's learning from television indicates that the likelihood that children will learn from screen media is influenced by their developing social relationships with on-screen characters, as much as by their developing perception of the screen and their symbolic understanding and comprehension of information presented on screen. Considering the circumstances in which children under 6 years learn from screen media can inform teachers, parents, and researchers about the important nature of social interaction in early learning and development. The findings reviewed in this article suggest the social nature of learning, even learning from screen media.