A cultural perspective of action-based learning by infants and young children

Decades of research have informed about ways in which infants and young children learn through action in connection with their sensory system. However, this research has not strongly addressed the issues of cultural diversity or taken into account everyday cultural experiences of young learners across different communities. Diversifying the scholarship of early learning calls for paradigm shifts, extending beyond the analysis at the individual level to make close connections with real-world experience while placing culture front and center. On the other hand, cultural research that specifies diversity in caregiver guidance and scaffolding, while providing insights into young learners' cultural experiences, has been conducted separately from the research of action-based cross-modal learning. Taking everyday activities as contexts for learning, in this chapter, we summarize seminal work on cross-modal learning by infants and young children that connects action and perception, review empirical evidence of cultural variations in caregiver guidance for early action-based learning, and make recommendations of research approaches for advancing the scientific understanding about cultural ways of learning across diverse communities.

Causal learning by infants and young children: From computational theories to language practices

Causal reasoning-the ability to reason about causal relations between events-is fundamental to understanding how the world works. This paper reviews two prominent theories on early causal learning and offers possibilities for theory bridging. Both theories grow out of computational modeling and have significant areas of overlap while differing in several respects. Explanation-Based Learning (EBL) focuses on young infants' learning about causal concepts of physical objects and events, whereas Bayesian models have been used to describe causal reasoning beyond infancy across various concept domains. Connecting the two models offers a more integrated approach to clarifying the developmental processes in causal reasoning from early infancy through later childhood. We further suggest that everyday language practices offer a promising space for theory bridging. We provide a review of selective work on caregiver-child conversations, in particular, on the use of scaffolding language including causal talk and pedagogical questions. Linking the research on language practices to the two cognitive theories, we point out directions for further research to integrate EBL and Bayesian models and clarify how causal learning unfolds in real life. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Learning Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development.

Explaining and exploring the dynamics of parent-child interactions and children's causal reasoning at a children's museum exhibit

This study examines how parents' and children's explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors support children's causal reasoning at a museum in San Jose, CA in 2017. One-hundred-nine parent-child dyads (3-6 years; 56 girls, 53 boys; 32 White, 9 Latino/Hispanic, 17 Asian-American, 17 South Asian, 1 Pacific Islander, 26 mixed ethnicity, 7 unreported) played at an air flow exhibit with a nonobvious causal mechanism. Children's causal reasoning was probed afterward. The timing of parents' explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors was related to children's systematic exploration during play. Children's exploratory behavior, and parents' goal setting during play, were related to children's subsequent causal reasoning. These findings support the hypothesis that children's exploration is related to both internal learning processes and external social scaffolding.

How mothers help children learn to use everyday objects

Children must learn specific motor actions to use everyday objects as their designers intended. However, designed actions are not obvious to children and often are difficult to implement. Children must know what actions to do and how to execute them. Previous work identified a protracted developmental progression in learning designed actions-from nondesigned exploratory actions, to display of the designed action, to successful implementation. Presumably, caregivers can help children to overcome the challenges in discovering and implementing designed actions. Mothers of 12-, 18- to 24-, and 30- to 36-month-olds (N = 74) were asked to teach their children to open containers with twist-off or pull-off lids. Mothers' manual and verbal input aligned with the developmental progression and with children's actions in the moment, pointing to the role of attuned social information in helping children learn to use objects for activities of daily living. However, mothers sometimes "overhelped" by implementing designed actions for children instead of getting children to do it themselves, highlighting the challenges of teaching novices difficult motor actions.

Towards imaging the infant brain at play

Infants' first-person experiences are crucial to early cognitive and neural development. To a vast extent, these early experiences involve play, which in infancy takes the form of object exploration. While at the behavioral level infant play has been studied both using specific tasks and in naturalistic scenarios, the neural correlates of object exploration have largely been studied in highly controlled task settings. These neuroimaging studies did not tap into the complexities of everyday play and what makes object exploration so important for development. Here, we review selected infant neuroimaging studies, spanning from typical, highly controlled screen-based studies on object perception to more naturalistic designs and argue for the importance of studying the neural correlates of key behaviors such as object exploration and language comprehension in naturalistic settings. We suggest that the advances in technology and analytic approaches allow measuring the infant brain at play with the use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Naturalistic fNIRS studies offer a new and exciting avenue to studying infant neurocognitive development in a way that will draw us away from our laboratory constructs and into an infant's everyday experiences that support their development.