Bridging the Lab and Lounge to Understand the Early Development of Visual Working Memory in Rural India

• In Event: Parent-Infant Interactions Around the World: What Mother Behaviours Across Socio-Cultural Groups Promote Cognitive and Language Outcomes?

Abstract

Research on early development of visual cognition has noted the importance of measuring individual differences among infants in lab-based tasks. However, in the real world, infants explore their surroundings with social partners who influence their visual cognition. While individual differences from lab-based tasks have been found to predict long-term outcomes such as academic achievement, how these differences feed into development of visual cognition outside the laboratory, while interacting with their social partners, remains an open question. This study aims to understand how the caregiver’s visual exploratory style influences the infants’ emerging visual cognitive abilities across contexts.

We present our data from a longitudinal study in rural India, examining the development of visual cognition in children and their parents experiencing severe adversities. The sample consists of 124 mothers and their six- and nine-month old infants. Sixty-four dyads were from low SES families. All families were living in the same micro-cultural context in Uttar Pradesh.

Infants and their mothers completed a preferential looking Visual Working Memory (VWM) task (Ross-Sheehy et al, 2003) separately, to obtain lab-based measures of their visual cognitive abilities. In the task, participants were presented with two streams of coloured squares with a changing and non-changing side. Each stream included either low, medium or high loads with set sizes of 2, 4, and 6 squares for parents and 1, 2 and 3 squares for infants. Successful performance was measured as the proportion of looks to the change side.

We first looked at the mother’s VWM performance. Timecourse analysis revealed that, overall, mothers detect change at low and medium loads but not in high load condition (Figure 1). Next, we examined the relation between mother and the infants VWM abilities. A second timecourse analysis with mother’s VWM performance as predictor of infants VWM performance revealed that higher performance among mothers was related to higher performance by their infants in the most demanding condition – the high load condition (Figure 2). Figure 2, further, shows that although mothers’ performance in both High and Low SES groups predicted the performance of their infants, the predictive effect appeared earlier in the trial for High SES group than for the Low SES group, indicating faster processing speed in the former.

We are currently analysing 10-minute long dyadic play sessions from the same sample which were recorded using head-mounted eye-trackers. We will examine the mother behaviours during play (i.e., how often dyads engage in joint attention and who leads the turn-taking episodes) predicting infants’ VWM performance. Likewise, we will investigate whether mother’s individual differences from the laboratory, such as the mother’s shift rate in the VWM task, extend to ‘lounge’ measures such as shift rate in the play session.

Assessing parent’s VWM abilities can have important implications as they might modulate the effectiveness of, for example, parent-based intervention. We hope to harness these individual differences to develop effective interventions for at-risk children targeting the early development of visual working memory, in longer-term.

Authors

• Prerna Aneja, University of East Anglia
  Presenting Author

• Thomas Carr, University of East Anglia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Samuel H Forbes, Durham University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Saber Sami, University of East Anglia
  Non-Presenting Author

• John P Spencer, University of East Anglia
  Non-Presenting Author