May 4: Andrea Urqueta Alfaro

Joint Engagement and Attachment Patterns in Infants with Visual Impairments

This research reports on two early childhood developments, joint engagement and attachment patterns, and explores a possible relationship between the two in a sample of 20 infants with various levels of visual impairments, without additional disabilities. Joint engagement and security and organization of attachment patterns have been associated with positive developmental outcomes, such as better language and socio-emotional skills, better performance in theory of mind tests, and reduced risk for psychopathology. 

Study 1 focuses on joint engagement, that is, infants’ coordination of their attention between a social partner and an external focus of shared interest. Infants and their caregivers were videotaped during 30-minute free play sessions at their homes. Videos were coded to establish the duration of joint engagement episodes, and the overall time dyads participated in it. Results showed that all infants tested participated in joint engagement and that the percentage of time it represented of the 30-minute free play session significantly increased between ages 12 and 18 months. The average duration of single episodes of joint engagement increased but only approached significance. The level of each infants’ visual impairment was described as reductions from norms in visual acuity and contrast sensitivity as measured using both visual evoked potential and preferential looking techniques. Of the visual measurements, infants’ reduction in contrast sensitivity measured with preferential looking technique predicted infants’ percentage of time in joint engagement across ages. This finding supports the importance of considering contrast sensitivity levels, rather than only those of visual acuity, in research with this population.

Study 2 focuses on attachment patterns. Infants and their caregivers underwent the Strange Situation Paradigm with added instructions to accommodate for the perceptual needs of infants with visual impairments. Results showed that all but 1 of the 27 SSPs collected were deemed classifiable. Most attachment patterns were secure, ranging between 56% in the younger group of infants tested, and 70% in the older group. Attachments coded as disorganized ranged between 22% and 6% in the younger and older groups respectively. 

Study 3 explores the relationship between infants’ security of attachment and the percentage of time they participated in joint engagement with their caregivers during free play. Results did not find a significant effect. This is in line with the mixed results in the literature on the connections of attachment and joint engagement, which not only varies in the finding of significant effects within a given population, but also varies between the results in different populations.

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.

April 27: Caren Walker, Department of Psychology

 Learning by Thinking and the Development of Abstract Reasoning

By 5 years of age, children already have highly structured knowledge of the world and they routinely form rich, abstract representations that extend beyond their direct experiences. How do children learn so quickly and accurately from such limited information? The vast majority of research to date has explored this question by investigating children’s developing abilities to draw inductive inferences from their observations. However, one of the distinguishing features of human cognition is our ability to go beyond the data and to generate ideas by thinking alone. How is learning by thinking possible? What does this phenomenon tell us about the nature of early mental representations and how they change? To begin to answer these questions, we must first isolate the contributions of our observations from the mechanisms that underlie learning. To this end, my research focuses on a suite of thought-based learning phenomena that are particularly widespread in childhood, including learning by analogy, by explanation, and by engagement in imaginary worlds. I will describe both theoretical and empirical work suggesting that these activities each impose unique, top-down constraints on children’s inferential processes. 

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm

April 20: Catherine Snow, Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor, Harvard University

The Neglected Literacy Skill

Despite robust evidence that classroom discussions promote academic outcomes, multiple forces converge to make authentic discussion a rare event in most U.S. classrooms.  We have been evaluating the contribution of discussion to reading comprehension outcomes among 4th-8th graders attending urban schools, and testing hypotheses about the mechanisms by which discussion enhances reading and writing skills.

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.

 

April 13: Adrienne Wente & Ruthe Foushee

Department of Psychology Graduate students, Adrienne Wente and Ruthe Foushee, will be presenting their research.

Adrienne Wente:

The development of free will beliefs in Chinese and U.S. children
This talk will discuss the development of beliefs about free will in Chinese and U.S. children. Here, free will is defined as the ability to choose to do otherwise. In this study, Chinese and U.S. 4- and 6-year-olds answered a series of questions to gauge whether they believe that they themselves and other people can freely choose to inhibit or act against their desires. Children were also asked to explain why they believe people can practice choice. Results indicate that children from both cultures increase the amount of choice they ascribed with age. However, findings also suggest cultural variability both in how much choice children ascribe, as well as how they
characterize the causal process of choice.

Ruthe Foushee:

Subjective Semantics: Children's semantic development and theory of mind

While semantic compositionality is fundamental to language, and must ultimately be mastered by the child, developing a compositional semantics might be difficult in part because some words have subjective meanings. Some words, like “pretty” (or “tasty,” etc.), are inherently subjective: whether or not a dax is “pretty” doesn’t depend on any property of the world, but is instead a matter of personal preference that speakers can disagree about. By contrast, other words, like “striped” (or “square,” etc.) have fixed, objective meanings: whether or not a dax is “striped” depends on whether the dax has stripes, and is independent of who is describing the dax. Finally, although the meanings of other words like “tall” (or “big,” etc.) depend on objective properties – e.g., for a dax to be “tall” it must be taller than most other daxes – they can also be subjective, and depend on a person’s past experience. 
I will be talking about the theoretical background and methods for a project in its early stages exploring children’s ability to integrate subjectivity in their compositional semantics, which requires them to coordinate not only their knowledge about word meanings and the world, but also to consider others’ personal preferences and past experiences. Preliminary data suggests that adults are sensitive to speakers' personal experience in evaluating the truth of their utterances using vague predicates, and that this sensitivity is developing during the preschool years. 

These talks will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.