ABSTRACT

Parents use music, especially singing, to interact with their young children, supporting parent-child bonding and social communication. Little is known about the parental attributes that support musical interactions with their infants. In this exploratory study, we analyzed self-report data from 43 caregiver/infant dyads at up to four time points (9, 12, 15, and 18 months) to assess parent social motivation and musical training as predictors of the home music environment overall, parental singing, and parental beliefs in the benefits of music. We also investigated the home music environment as a predictor of language development longitudinally. Parent social motivation was a stronger predictor of the home music environment than musical training. Parents' social motivation was positively related to parental singing, beliefs, and overall music environment, while musical training was only related to their beliefs. Furthermore, parent singing and overall home music, but not parental beliefs, were associated with infants' vocabulary comprehension, production, and gestures. Results highlight that music engagement in early childhood is fundamentally a social experience and emphasize the importance of parents' active participation (vs. only their beliefs) in musical experiences with their infant. The social nature of music experiences in infancy may contribute to relationships between the home music environment and child language development.

ABSTRACT

Infants are highly sensitive to social stimuli from early on in ontogeny. Social cues, including others' gaze, not only capture and guide infants' attention, but also modulate the efficiency in which the infant (brain) encodes and recognizes information. Over the last two decades, the novelty preference based object-processing paradigm has been instrumental in investigating this phenomenon experimentally. This paper offers a comprehensive review and critical evaluation of methodological aspects and empirical findings from previous research using this paradigm to study the influence of (non-)social cues on infants' object processing. We highlight the critical role of methodological details and discuss influential factors such as eye contact, infants' object-directed attention, naturalistic environments, and potential neural correlates associated with enhanced object encoding. A comprehensive review table summarizes key methodological details from previous studies to assist researchers in making informed decisions when designing future studies. We conclude that the object-processing paradigm has proven to be an effective method with high potential for future research disentangling the influence of fine-grained factors on infants' object memory.

No abstract is available for this article.

Infancy, Volume 30, Issue 1, January/February 2025.

ABSTRACT

In late infancy and early toddlerhood, joint attention ability is widely recognized as a crucial foundation for children's vocabulary development, though the exact nature of its contribution remains debated. This study investigates associations between joint attention and subsequent vocabulary development, as well as the possible moderating role of supportive parental behaviors. Seventy children and their families participated in this longitudinal study, which began when the children were 10 months of age. Parents completed the Swedish Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) at four age points (10, 12, 18, and 24 months) to assess receptive and expressive vocabulary growth. Children participated in lab-based assessment of joint attention abilities at 10, 12, and 18 months. Additionally, at 10 and 12 months, parent-child dyads participated in two semi-structured lab assessments to evaluate the quality of parental supportive behaviors during interactions with their child. Primary analysis showed no significant effects of joint attention on subsequent receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, a significant interaction was found between a child's ability to respond to joint attention cues and parental supportive behaviors on receptive vocabulary. These findings indicate that parental supportive behaviors play a crucial role in promoting the development of children's receptive vocabulary.

ABSTRACT

Emerging evidence suggests smartphone use has adverse effects on mother-infant relationships. However, while research suggests that maternal responsiveness is reduced when using a smartphone, little research has been undertaken with infants. This study used cross-sectional data to explore associations between infant social-emotional development, maternal mental health outcomes, smartphone use, and mother-infant responsiveness. We recruited 450 mothers with infants aged 3–9 months, in the UK. Data were collected between October 2021 and April 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Validated self-report scales measured predictor variables and an outcome variable of mother-infant responsiveness. Hierarchical linear multiple regression identified a final model (R ² = 0.385, F (3,432) = 17.33, p < 0.001), with four significant predictors for mother-infant responsiveness: infant social-emotional development, birth parity, perceived social support in the form of appraisal, and likelihood of maternal smartphone use when the infant may be perceived as passive. These results suggest that within this sample, suboptimal infant social-emotional development, additional children in the family, lack of appraisal support for mothers, as well as maternal smartphone use during critical periods of parenting all demonstrate a negative association with mother-infant responsiveness. The results have implications for planning early support for mothers in the first months of their infant's life.

Infancy, Volume 30, Issue 1, January/February 2025.

ABSTRACT

From early in development, humans use imitation to express social engagement, to understand social affiliations, and to learn from others. Nevertheless, the social and instrumental goals that drive imitation in everyday and pedagogical contexts are highly intertwined. What cues might infants use to infer that a social goal is driving imitation? Here we use minimal and tightly controlled visual displays to evaluate 15-month-olds’ attribution of social goals to imitation. In particular, we ask whether they see the very same simple, imitative actions shared between two agents as social or nonsocial when those actions occur in the absence or presence of intentional cues such as obstacles, object goals, and efficient, causally effective action. Our results suggest that infants' attributing social value to imitation only in the absence of such intentional cues may be a signature of humans' early understanding of imitation. We propose, moreover, that a systematic evaluation of a set of simple scenarios that probe candidate principles of early knowledge about social and instrumental actions and goals is possible and promises to inform our understanding of the foundational knowledge on which human social learning is built, as well as to aid the building of human-like artificial intelligence.

ABSTRACT

Current research indicates likely developmental connections between the evolution of sleep patterns, motor skills progression, and the expansion of vocabulary. These connections are grounded in the well-established role of sleep in memory and learning, as well as in the cascading effects on language development of the acquisition of new motor skills. However, no study has so far undertaken a comprehensive and systematic examination of these connections or explored their developmental trajectory over time. Yet understanding vocabulary development depends on considering development in the sleep regulation and motor domains, to provide a biologically grounded explanation of how early lexicons are built and strengthened. This study investigates the links between vocabulary growth and two significant changes occurring over the first 2 years of life: self-initiated locomotion and the consolidation of overnight sleep. Our results reveal mutual associations between these domains, which tend to emerge during periods of marked developmental change in language, motor skills, and sleep patterns regulation. Moreover, these associations were observed to change over time, suggesting dynamic interconnections between these developmental domains. Our findings point toward the importance of investigating vocabulary development from a dynamic systems perspective, as the product of continuous interactions between cognition, the body and the environment.

ABSTRACT

The interplay of emotional availability (EA) and child temperament in association with early language development is understudied. We explored associations between maternal EA and infant communicative development and possible moderations by child temperament. Participants were 151 mother-child dyads from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study. Path models of associations between 8-month maternal EA and 14-month communicative development and moderation by infant temperament traits were created using SEM. Results show that EA positively predicted a latent variable of communicative development at 14 months. No direct longitudinal effect of EA on 30-month vocabulary was found. Child surgency/extraversion at 6 and 12 months significantly predicted 14-month communicative skills. Temperament did not moderate the association between EA and communicative development. Findings underscore the additive role of maternal caregiving and early surgency/extraversion in predicting early communicative development. The emotional aspects of parenting should be acknowledged as contributors to early communicative development in future studies.

ABSTRACT

Humans are curious. Especially children are known for their drive to explore and learn, which is crucial for developing in and navigating through our complex world. Naturally, some children may be more curious than others, leading to differences in how they structure their own learning experiences, subsequently impacting their developmental trajectories. However, there is a gap in the research field for a reliable measure of such differences early in development. Across three studies, we present the development and assessment of the Infant and Toddler Curiosity Questionnaire (ITCQ), the first caregiver report measure to fill this gap. Items cover observable exploration behaviors in 5- to 24-month-olds to capture general tendencies of their desire to actively explore their immediate surroundings and are evaluated on a 7-point Likert-scale. Exploratory factor analyses and structural equation modeling on a sample of N = 370 UK caregivers led to the final selection of 23 items and provided evidence that the scale allows the reliable computation of an overall curiosity score, with three emergent subscales (Sensory, Investigative, and Interactive) explaining additional variance in the data. Furthermore, the scale had good test-retest reliability after 7–14 days (N = 67) and related to the child's temperament (N = 75; positively with surgency and effortful control, negatively with negative affect) offering evidence of its validity as a trait measure. Together, these results support the scale's reliability and validity, showcasing the ITCQ as a powerful tool for developmental research.

ABSTRACT

The ability to recognize and act on others' emotions is crucial for navigating social interactions successfully and learning about the world. One way in which others' emotions are observable is through their movement kinematics. Movement information is available even at a distance or when an individual's face is not visible. Infants have been shown to be sensitive to emotions in movement kinematics of transporting actions, like moving an object from one to another place. However, it is still unknown whether they associate the manipulated object with the emotions contained in moving it, and whether they use this information to guide their own exploration of this object. In this study, 12-month-old infants watched actors transporting two toys with positive or negative emotional valence. Then, infants were given the possibility to interact with the same toys. We expected the infants to look at and touch the toy handled in a positive manner more, compared to the toy handled in a negative manner. Our results showed that infants looked at the positive toys more than at the negative toys, but that infants touched both toys for the same amount of time. Also, there was no difference in which toy they manually explored first.

ABSTRACT

East Asians are more likely than North Americans to attend to visual scenes holistically, focusing on the relations between objects and their background rather than isolating components. This cultural difference in context sensitivity—greater attentional allocation to the background of an image or scene—has been attributed to socialization, yet it is unknown how early in development it appears, and whether it is moderated by social information. We employed eye-tracking to investigate context-sensitivity in 15-month-olds in Japan (n = 45) and the United States (n = 52). Viewing faces, Japanese infants were more attentive and studied the background longer than U.S. infants. Viewing cartoon videos, Japanese infants looked at the background twice as long as U.S. infants, particularly for objects with eyes. In parent-child book reading, Japanese parents referred to the background significantly more than U.S. parents, although this was uncorrelated with infant behavior on the preceding tasks. These findings illustrated that cultural differences in attention are detectable in infancy, and that sustained attention may be an important foundation upon which culturally-specific attentional styles are built. Overall, results were consistent with the view that a context-sensitive orientation first emerges for social information and later generalizes to non-social situations.

ABSTRACT

Musical interactions between caregivers and their infants typically rely on a limited repertoire of live vocal songs and recorded music. Research suggests that these well-known songs are especially effective at eliciting engaged behaviors from infants in controlled settings, but how infants respond to familiar music with their caregivers in their everyday environment remains unclear. The current study used an online questionnaire to quantify how often and why caregivers present certain songs and musical recordings to their infants. Using a cross-sectional approach, we explored infants' changing behavioral profiles to music from birth to 24 months. Caregivers additionally reported on their feelings of affective attachment toward their infants. Results reveal that caregivers sing and play recorded music for younger and older infants at comparably high rates. In turn, infants actively respond to their favorite songs and recordings by demonstrating positive emotions, movements, and attentive listening. Caregivers mainly consider their infants' musical preferences when building their shared musical repertoire at home. Both caregivers' engagement in musical activities with their children and infants' enthusiastic responsiveness to singing predicted stronger dyadic attachment bonding. Caregivers and infants jointly contribute to building musical relationships, and these musical relationships may be intertwined with their emerging social-emotional bonds.

ABSTRACT

This study examined associations between spousal relationship quality and social support with mother-infant bonding among women in Rawalpindi, Pakistan (Intervention Arm: n = 352, M _age = 25.1, SD = 4.7; Control Arm: n = 358, M _age = 25.3, SD = 4.5). We used cross-sectional data from the Happy Mother-Healthy Baby intervention study, a randomized controlled trial conducted between 2019 and 2022. Women were enrolled at their first prenatal visit (at or before 22 weeks of gestation) and followed until 6-week postpartum. Spousal relationship quality, social support, and bonding were assessed at 6-week postpartum. Linear regression analyses found relationship quality (b = 3.85) and social support (b = 1.99) were positively associated with bonding. Analyses were adjusted for mother's education, treatment group, exposure to perinatal intimate partner violence, postpartum depressive symptoms, husband's education, husband's occupation, infant birthweight, and preterm birth. Husband's occupation (unskilled/unemployed vs. professional/skilled) significantly moderated the relationship between social support (b = 3.27 vs. b = 1.37) and relationship quality (b = 5.36 vs. b = 2.95) with bonding. Maternal age (≤ 25 years old vs. > 25 years old) significantly moderated the association between relationship quality and bonding (b = 4.96 vs. b = 2.49). Results suggest that interventions focused on improving social support and relationship quality among anxious women and their spouses could improve maternal-infant bonding. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03880032; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03880032