Poster #144 - Toddlers Actively Initiate Social Interactions: Delineating Temporal Pattern and Functions of Social Interactions While Gaming

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

In 2020, 93% of 2- to 4-year-olds used mobile devices, with touchscreens being the most commonly owned device by young children (Rideout & Robb, 2020). As touchscreens have entered home, daycare/school, and other settings, children incorporate them into a new context of communication and play. Research examining children’s use of technology often places an emphasis on caregiver scaffolding, with less attention to children’s active role. The present study investigated how children navigated a novel gaming app in the presence of adults by focusing on social interactions initiated by the child. Specifically, we examined the frequency, the temporal distribution, and various functions of child-initiated interactions when 2.5-year-olds played a game on a tablet.

Twenty-nine children participated at a university in Northern California. They were recruited through birth announcements, hospitals, and community events. The sample of 29- to 35-month-olds came from a larger study that examined children’s cognitive flexibility across physical play, digital play, and drawing (Antrilli & Wang, 2018). The majority of the sample were of middle-class backgrounds (64%) and self-identified as European-American (65%).

Each child sat at a table with a researcher and played a non-educational game app, BubbleXplode, for 9 minutes. Parents sat a few steps away, filling out surveys, and were instructed to allow the child to play the game on their own. None of the children had played the game before. Following a demonstration by the researcher, all children were able to navigate and engage with the game at their own pace. We coded verbal and nonverbal interactions that children initiated. We also coded what function each initiation served, including sharing of their success in the game, requesting assistance, requesting a switch to the look of the game (e.g., changing bubbles to pumpkins), and inviting the adult to join in. Instances that were off-track, ambiguous, or uninterpretable were coded as other.

Three results emerged. First, the children initiated an average of 21.5 interactions (SD = 14.5) during the 9-minute session, suggesting their tendency to treat gaming as a social activity. Second, nonverbal interactions tended to occur at the beginning of the gaming session, whereas verbal interactions tended to occur during the middle of the session, both ps < 0.006. Third, the aforementioned four functions evenly accounted for verbal interactions, p = 0.319; for nonverbal interactions, among two discernable categories (success and assistance), children initiated more interactions to share success than to request assistance, p = 0.040.

The results indicated that although the 2.5-year-olds received no instruction to engage in social interaction, they tended to approach gaming on a touchscreen as a social activity to engage with the researcher or the parent verbally or nonverbally. These child-initiated interactions, on the other hand, served to facilitate the 2.5-year-olds’ effective use of the device for fun play. Together, the findings underscore the need to further investigate how technology may shape or be shaped by young children’s tendency to treat the activity as social and how this relation may impact their learning and emotional well-being.

Authors

• Isabelle Gross, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author

• Su-hua Wang, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Nick Antrilli