3-227 - Rhythms of experience: Building knowledge through sequences of stability and change

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

A challenge for building knowledge over time is to sample one's environment broadly enough so that potential input becomes available input, but in a way that prevents novelty from interfering with encoding and connecting what is sampled. Sequences of "staying" and "switching" are the experiences that constitute input to a developing system, but we understand very little about these rhythms in early human life. The four papers in this symposium present exciting new discoveries about the dynamics of ordered experiences -- over seconds, minutes, days, and months -- and suggest that these rhythms are constrained by developmental level and also matter for learning.

Paper 1 finds that how long 3-month-old infants look at something depends on the duration of their previous looks. Paper 2 shows that motor exploration in older infants consists of frequent switching between postures, only some of which support sustained looking, yielding a rhythm of interleaved shorter and longer periods of visual attention. Paper 3 reveals developmental change in daily rhythms, with frequent activity switches for young infants and more extended bouts of coherent activity for toddlers. Paper 4 provides an important example of how the repeated or variable nature of experiences over time matter for learning, finding that children learn words better in a context that repeats over weeks.

People encounter the contents of their world in time. These papers detail rhythms of stability and change at multiple timescales and suggest directions for future research into how nested rhythms may work together to support building knowledge.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chair

• Caitlin Fausey, University of Oregon

Individual Presentations

• Rhythms of looking: Temporal dependency in visual information sampling - Presenting Author: Daniel Messinger, Univ of Miami; Whitney Ian Mattson, University of Michigan; James Torrence Todd, Florida International University; Devon Nicole Gangi, University of Miami; Nicholas D Myers, University of Miami; Lorraine E Bahrick, Florida International Univ

• Real-time switches in postural position affect access to perceptual information in crawling infants - Presenting Author: Kasey C. Soska, Florida International University; Karen E Adolph, New York University; Scott Reginald Robinson, No Institutional Affiliation

• The changing rhythms of life: Activity cycles in the first two years of everyday experience - Presenting Author: Caitlin Fausey, University of Oregon; Swapnaa Jayaraman, Indiana University, Bloomington; Linda B Smith, Indiana University

• Repeatedly Reading the Same Stories Facilitates Word Learning For Both Typically-Developing Children and Children with SLI - Presenting Author: Jessica S Horst, University of Sussex; Josefa Ceurremans, University of Bielefeld; Katharina J. Rohlfing, Bielefeld University