Poster #27 - The Supported Video Chat Deficit: In-Person Interactions are the Richest Context for Children’s Learning

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

When two-year-old Madeline video chats with Auntie Jen, how are those interactions different than if Auntie were physically present? Does Madeline need support to understand that Auntie can teach her new things via video chat just as she can in-person?

The video deficit (Anderson & Pempek, 2005) documents that children learn less well from video than from live interactions. Children mentally represent video as “not-real” (Troseth, 2003), and video lacks mutual eye gaze and responsive vocalizations (Troseth et al, 2006). Lacking social cues, children interpret video as non-intentional and irrelevant for learning (Strouse et al, 2018). However, video chat is socially contingent - immediate (partner responds right away), reliable (responds every time) and accurate (responses reflect ongoing reality) (Roseberry et al, 2014).

Children need assistance from adult co-viewers to understand similarities between video chat and live interactions (Myers et al, 2018; Strouse et al, 2018). The American Academy of Pediatrics (2016) recommends that parents co-view with children, but most studies examine children video chatting alone. Co-viewing clearly has an impact on children’s viewing behavior (attention, imitation, participation) (McClure et al, 2018; Myers et al, 2018), but the impact on children’s learning (transfer, memory) is less clear (Moser et al., 2015; Strouse et al., 2018).

Our study examined 24-36 month-olds’ interaction with and learning from video chat and live Partners (between-subjects). A co-viewer assisted children in transferring new information from the Partner’s setting to their own environments. We expected that children in Live would outperform those in Video Chat, and these condition differences would diminish with increasing age.

We scored children’s responses to the Partner: synced in-time responses and imitation of novel actions. We also tested children’s learning and transfer of novel words (within-subjects): recognition of Partner’s labeled object (point to Partner’s target object), extension to real objects (select target object), and generalization to a different exemplar (select different colored target object) (Ganea et al, 2008). We used analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) with age, partner condition, transfer, and interactions.

Results showed the video deficit for children’s learning of novel words, but not for participation with the partner (Table 1). As hypothesized, children in the Live condition learned and transferred more words than children in the Video Chat condition, and there was a trend for the condition difference to shrink with age. Although word learning in Video Chat was significantly better than chance (p=.003 and <.001), it was significantly poorer than the Live condition (Table 1d, partner condition). Participation with the Partner showed different results: children imitated actions (Table 1c) and made similarly synced responses (Table 1b) in Live and Video Chat conditions. Significantly more looks to the Co-viewer (Table 1a) indicated that children used the Co-viewer’s support more effectively in Live than in Video Chat.

Overall, even scaffolded video chat interactions were inferior to live interactions for children’s word learning and transfer, even though children participated with video chat partners similarly to live partners. This adds to growing evidence that participation with on-screen content does not necessarily lead to meaningful learning.

Authors

• Lauren J Myers, Lafayette College
  Presenting Author

• Heather Keyser, Lafayette College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mary Cors, Lafayette College
  Non-Presenting Author