Dynamics of the dyad: Reciprocal relations between infant action and caregiver input

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Infants and their caregivers interact in reciprocal and responsive ways, each contributing actions and inputs that structure opportunities for infant learning. This symposium brings together four perspectives on the connections between infant action and caregiver input. Each study leverages a different methodological approach, including longitudinal observations of infants’ interactions at home, qualitative assessments of parenting behaviors, and computational approaches using computer vision.

Presentation 1 demonstrates that the transition to walking shapes rates of communication from caregivers. Compared to crawling, bouts of walking were more likely to co-occur with caregiver language and gesture input that encouraged locomotion or described objects. Presentation 2 chronicles the time-locked nature of infants’ real-time actions and caregivers’ action verbs, revealing temporal contiguity between verb input in the precise moments when infants produce a relevant action.

Presentation 3 employs machine-learning to examine how infants and caregivers jointly create visual data for object recognition. Both infants’ and caregivers’ actions with objects created the best data for learning—multiple scenes of the same object in different orientations. Presentation 4 documents the relations between caregivers’ beliefs about motor development, the objects and activities they select for infants, and the timing of infants’ motor skills. Parental choices of toys that promoted movement were related to earlier onsets of crawling and walking, whereas stationary play showed the opposite relation.

Collectively, these studies reveal the dynamic interconnections between infants’ and caregivers’ behaviors—both in real-time as infants and caregivers respond to one another, and over developmental time as infants acquire new foundational skills.

Sub Unit

• Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Chair

• Joshua L Schneider, University of Pittsburgh

Individual Presentations

• Infant Walking Shapes Language and Gesture Input from Caregivers - Presenting Author: Joshua L Schneider, University of Pittsburgh; Non-Presenting Author: Jana M Iverson, Boston University

• “Push the button!”: Real-time correspondence between infant actions and caregiver verb inputs - Presenting Author: Kelsey L West, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Katelyn Fletcher, Temple University; Non-Presenting Author: Karen E Adolph, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Catherine S Tamis-Lemonda, New York University

• Active viewing in infants facilitates visual object learning: A computational modeling approach - Presenting Author: David Crandall, Indiana University - Bloomington; Non-Presenting Author: Satoshi Tsutsui, Indiana University; Non-Presenting Author: Chen Yu, Indiana University

• Creating affordances: Do parental choices regarding the physical environment predict motor development and object play? - Presenting Author: Ora Oudgenoeg-Paz, Universiteit Utrecht; Non-Presenting Author: Paul Pm Leseman, Utrecht University; Non-Presenting Author: M.J.M. Volman, Utrecht University