Lisa M. Oakes - US grants

The goal of the proposed project is to investigate the stability of individual differences in infants' allocation of attentional resources, and to determine whether infants at risk for later cognitive and attentional deficits have difficulty maintaining their attentional focus. Infants learn about their world by attending to the environment around them. Novel events that occur, however, may distract their focus. Thus, infants must develop the ability to maintain their attentional focus to important stimuli, and ignore unimportant irrelevant ones. Previous research suggests that the ability to allocate attentional resources in this way develops considerably during the first year of life. Moreover, individual differences in these abilities may exist in infancy. Such individual differences would have serious consequences for infants' acquisition of information about the world. If infants are easily distracted, they will be less able to maintain their attention to novel objects, events, and people, and learn about those stimuli. In addition, infants born prematurely are at risk for later deficits in attention, and have been shown to have difficulty processing visual information in infancy. Thus, premature infants may be particularly at risk for deficits in allocation of attentional resources. The proposed project will evaluate infants' distractibility during object manipulation longitudinally between 7 and 10 months of age. The project will determine whether individual differences in distractibility are stable over this age range, and whether individual differences exist for distractibility in general or only during focused and concentrated attention. In addition, temperament measures will be obtained to determine whether individual differences in infants' allocation of attentional resources are related to temperamental characteristics. Finally, a sample of infants born prematurely will also be observed to determine whether infants who are at risk for later attentional deficits are more distractible in infancy. The results of this project will provide insight into the development of attention skills in infancy, and further our understanding of the development of children at risk for deficits later in childhood.

DESCRIPTION: The ability to recognize categorical relations is perhaps our most fundamental cognitive skill; categories summarize and organize our acquired knowledge, and allow us to extend our knowledge to new instances. The ability to categorize is particularly crucial in infancy, when much is to be learned about the world. Because of its importance, categorization, in infancy has been extensively studied over the past 20 years, focusing on whether infants attend to natural categories such as dogs, furniture, and trucks, and on how infants form categories of artificially constructed stimuli, such as geometric shapes, schematic animals, and line drawings of faces. The proposed research will further our understanding of the development of categorization skills in infancy by 1) demonstrating the relation between categorization in different procedures, and 2) assessing the roles of factors believed to contribute to the development of infants' use of their categorization skills. The present approach views categorization as a process that is more or less easily applied in different contexts. Thus, differences in categorization as a function of task (i.e., if infants respond to a particular category in some procedures but not others) are seen as task demands influencing how easily infants can use their categorization skills. This is not the same as a competence-performance distinction, in which tasks mask infants underlying competence and thus the demands of the tasks are seen as less important than that underlying competence. In the present perspective, task demands are an integral part of infants' forming categories. Thus, categorization skills are used in conjunction with other cognitive skills. Two sets of studies are proposed. First, infants' categorization in visual familiarization and object examining, two widely used assessments of categorization in infancy, will be compared. If a single process underlies categorization in different procedures, infants should form categories in the same way, and forming a category in one procedure should facilitate the formation of categories in subsequent procedures. This first set of studies will provide additional evidence that categorization in different procedures is a function of a single general process. The second set of studies will evaluate the factors that contribute to the development of infants use of those categorization skills. For example, procedures are assumed to require that infants use both their categorization and attentional skills. Thus, as infants develop they may be better able to simultaneously use both types of skills. This hypothesis will be tested by evaluating infants formation of categories in procedures that vary in the demands they place on infants attentional resources. In addition, increased knowledge about particular objects is assumed to contribute to why older infants more easily categorize items than do younger infants. Experiments will systematically assess the role of familiarity on infants' formation of categories.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Visual short-term memory is crucially important for tasks significant in infancy such as developing hand-eye coordination and associating words with objects. Thus, understanding infants' short-term memory abilities will add significantly to our understanding of normal development. Unlike long-term memory, which has a virtually unlimited capacity, short-term memory has a very limited capacity, and this has serious consequences for many other aspects of cognition. For example, reduced short-term memory capacity may lead a developing system to focus on smaller chunks of the input, facilitating the acquisition of language and other cognitive abilities. Thus, understanding of infants' short-term memory abilities is important for understanding the general constraints on cognitive development. The goals of the proposed project are to develop sensitive procedures to assess short-term memory in infancy and to use those procedures to determine how infants' short-term memory abilities are similar to and different from those of older children and adults. In the first year, two experiments will be conducted to evaluate the usefulness of two change-detection procedures for assessing infants' visual short-term memory. In one procedure, infants' preference for changing over non-changing stimulus streams will be observed. The logic is that if infants can remember the items in the display, they will detect the change and prefer (i.e., look longer at) streams that change over those that remain the same. The second procedure will evaluate infants' ability to learn that changing (or non-changing) streams are associated with a reward as indicated by their accurately turning their head toward the source of that reward. If infants detect a change (or no change), they will be more likely to turn their head toward the rewarding stimulus than of they do not detect a change (or no change). The logic is that infants w ill correctly turn their head only when the number of items in the changing (or non-changing) array does not exceed their short-term memory capacity. In the second year of the project, the more sensitive of these two procedures will be used to determine the capacity of short-term memory in infants and whether infants, like adults, can remember multiple-feature objects just as easily as single-feature objects. These experiments will provide an important foundation for the study of short-term memory in infancy.

Description (provided by applicant): Segregating is essential for and acting the objects in one's figures from grounds effectively perceiving upon environment. Reaching for and grasping objects, navigating a cluttered environment, and accurately perceiving how objects are arranged in depth all depend on the perception of some regions as figure and others as background. Therefore, figure-ground (FG) segregation has implications for normal cognitive and perceptual development in infancy. Despite the importance of FG segregation for infants' cognitive development, no research has directly investigated infants' sensitivity to cues to FG assignment. This is one goal of the proposed work. Cues to FG assignment are perceptual regularities that infants can learn as they perceive and act on the visual world. Another goal of the proposed work is to understand how motor achievements provides new opportunities for infants to learn such regularities. Preliminary findings indicate a relation between the emergence of self-sitting, a motor achievement that has consequences for infants' skilled reaching for objects, and infants' use of symmetry as a cue to FG segregation. The proposed project will further explore this relation by (1) refining the assessment and classification of infants' sitting abilities (Experiment 1), (2) evaluating the relation between self-sitting abilities and infants' use of a different cue to, FG segregation, lower region (Experiment 2), (3) developing a new procedure to directly test the relation between reaching and infants' FG segregation (Experiment 3), and (4) longitudinally assessing both selfsitting and FG segregation abilities to determine the developmental time courses of these two abilities (Experiment 4). The proposed experiments, therefore, will add significantly to our understanding of an aspect of infants' visual perception that has consequences for their abilities to learn about and effectively interact with the environment, and these experiments will provide a deep understanding in the mechanisms that underlie developmental changes in this aspect of infants' visual perception.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is crucially important for tasks that are significant in infancy, such as developing hand-eye coordination and associating words with objects. Understanding how infants represent objects in VSTM is therefore central to understanding how they come to learn about the objects around them. In addition, individual difference in short-term memory are associated with differences in language comprehension abilities. Thus, understanding infants'short-term memory abilities will have a profound impact on understanding both normal and abnormal cognitive development. The broad goal of this project is to deepen our knoweldge of the early development of infants'VSTM for features and combinations of features. Research and theory have emphasized a division between representations of object identity features and representations of object location. These two classes of features are stored in functionally and anatomically segregated VSTM subsystems in adults, and we will examine whether infants'VSTM for these two different types of features have independent developmental time courses. In addition, a central issue in contemporary cognitive science is the binding of features into integrated object representations, and we will explore the development of feature binding in infant VSTM. This issue is particularly important in infancy because the ability to bind features is essential for an adult-like representation of objects. The proposed experiments will use a preference task that we have previously used to chart the development of VSTM for color. Using this task, we will (a) precisely measure the developmental time course of VSTM for object identity features (color and orientation;Experiments 1 and 2), (b) compare this developmental time course with the developmental time course of VSTM for location (Experiment 3), and (c) assess the development of the processes that bind features together in memory, for both bindings of two identity features and bindings of object identity features with location (Experiments 4, 5, and 6).

This conference brings together leading researchers to address both the historical roots of the information-processing approach and its future direction in the study of infant perception and cognition. One important emphasis of this conference, to be held as a preconference to the International Conference on Infant Studies on March 26th, 2007, is its exploration of the underlying processes that explain developmental change from infancy to childhood. By focusing on a single theoretical perspective, the conference allows its participants to view how the information-processing approach can address development across a number of important and diverse domains, such as infant attention, object perception, face processing, spatial cognition, object categorization, and symbolic understanding. A number of leading researchers will address the future directions of the field, some of whom will outline innovative methodological approaches, while others link the historical roots of this approach to its future directions. The uniqueness of the conference is in linking many diverse areas of cognition under one theoretical framework. The conference is also intended to recognize the contribution of Leslie B. Cohen, both theoretically and methodologically, in advancing the understanding of infant perception and cognition.

The small conference will facilitate interactions among researchers, many of whom may not usually exchange ideas because they focus on different aspects of infant perceptual and cognitive development. An important component of the conference is providing support for young investigators (graduate students, post-docs, and junior faculty) to attend the conference and participate in discussions via travel awards. The smaller size of the conference will provide an intimate arena for interaction among leading researchers and young investigators alike, with the goal of serving as a catalyst for forging collaborations among more experienced as well as junior investigators, and engendering new ideas about the future direction of the field. The presentations of each invited speaker will be published in an edited volume by Oxford University Press, which will allow dissemination of the presentations and findings to a broader audience.

How do infants come to learn about and understand the large numbers of objects, events, and people they encounter? It is remarkable that by one year of age, the typical infant in middle-class American culture knows that dogs say "woof," you drink from cups, and there is a class of round objects called "balls." Science has focused both on how infants come to represent the properties of particular objects (e.g., my teddy has a red shirt) and classes of objects (e.g., cars have wheels). The functions of objects are central to many concepts -- we learn not only the surface features of objects (such as shape and color), but also about how objects can be used and for what purpose they were created (e.g., to hold liquid, to make marks on paper). Despite the large literature documenting infants' impressive abilities to acquire knowledge about objects, and the importance of function to how objects are represented, we know little about infants' emerging abilities to represent function. This work will address this gap by examining infants' emerging understanding of function from 6 to 12 months, and by determining how their developing abilities to manually explore objects (i.e., pick them up, rotate them) is related to their understanding of function. By measuring aspects of infants' looking behavior -- how long they watch particular events, where they look -- we can understand how they learn about and represent the objects and actions in these events. By observing how they play with objects -- how easily they pick them up from the floor, how long they inspect objects in their hands -- we can measure developmental changes in infants' abilities to manually explore objects. In this work, both looking at images and playing with objects will be assessed in infants to document how developments in the two areas are related.

Filling this gap in our knowledge is important because of the significance of function for understanding object representations in general and because understanding typical development of object representation is critically important for a full appreciation of atypical developmental patterns of object representation, such as those associated with Williams Syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Individuals with these disorders often have difficulty learning about and representing objects and actions, particularly the actions performed by humans on objects. Unfortunately, these disorders are often not identified until later in childhood, and as a result we know little about the early emergence of these atypical patterns of development. A comprehensive understanding of the typical development of object representation in infancy may aid in early identification and treatment of individuals with such neurodevelopmental disorders. A full understanding of typical development of basic cognitive abilities, such as infants' representation of objects, is also important for educating parents and caregivers about development and appropriate expectations for infants. The results of this work will be broadly disseminated, not only to the scientific community through publication in scientific journals and presentation at national and international conferences, but also to parents and childcare professionals through lectures given to parenting groups, participation at the Yolo County Child Development Conference, and television and radio.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Sophisticated representations of objects provide the foundation for conceptual knowledge of the world, for language, for quantitative reasoning, and for social interactions. The ability to form such representations is therefore critically important for infants'developing comprehension of the world. Understanding how infants'representations of objects develop is central to our knowledge of infant cognition, and provides insight into both typical and atypical patterns of development. For example, children with Williams Syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorder have known deficits in their visual processing. Identifying typical patterns of development provides a key starting point for understanding such deficits. The broad goal of this project is to deepen our understanding of how infants become able to form increasingly sophisticated object representations across the first year of life. Specifically, we will study the abilities that make it possible for infants to represent new kinds of object features. In particular, using measures of infant looking at computer generated images and object manipulation, we will (a) examine the role of motor development in infants'representation of the surface properties of objects (Experiments 1-4), and (b) investigate the role of developing memory and attention skills on the features infants represent (Experiments 5-7). These two aims are well supported by the literature. It has long been held that infants learn about objects in their environment through action. The proposed work builds on this tradition. In addition, researchers have come to believe that objects and events are represented in the moment, during the acts of perceiving, attending, comparing, and so on. The present work extends this approach to understanding how infants create representations of the objects and events they encounter. The findings from this project will contribute to our understanding of atypical patterns of development, such as those characterizing Williams Syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Autistic children have deficits in representing actions;Williams syndrome individuals have deficits in ventral stream processing. This project, will provide insight into typical development of infants'representation or action and of features likely processed by the ventral and dorsal pathways. Thus, the typical development outlined here will provide an important point of reference for understanding the atypical development in such disorders. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE Children with Williams Syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorder have known deficits in their visual processing. Identifying typical patterns of development provides a key starting point for understanding such deficits. The broad goal of this project is to deepen our understanding of how infants become able to form increasingly sophisticated object representations across the first year of life, and therefore providing a foundation for our understanding of atypical patterns of development.

In this project, Dr. Oakes will examine how infants' everyday experiences shape their learning. Most theories of cognitive development argue for the role of experience in processes such as learning, memory, and perception, but few studies have systematically examined how experience shapes changes in cognition. This project will fill this gap by systematically examining how naturally occurring differences in experience (e.g., living with a pet versus not living with a pet) and experimentally enhanced experience (e.g., being provided with a picture book of unfamiliar animals to read) contributes to infants' learning of, attention to, and perception of images. In the first year of life, as infants interact with the people and animals they encounter, they learn about faces, emotions, language, the behavior typical of particular kinds of animals (e.g., dogs bark and cats meow), etc. This project will enhance our understanding of this important process by examining aspects of looking behavior by 3- to 9-month-old infants as they visually investigate images of animals and human faces. Differences in how long infants look, precisely where they look (e.g. the heads versus the tails of dogs, the eyes versus the ears of human faces) will reveal how infants are perceiving, attending to, and learning about those images. By comparing infants with more or less relevant experience, this project will uncover differences in how infants' previous experience influences their learning about images. Moreover, by experimentally enhancing experience through the provision of picture books created for this study (e.g., exposing an infant who does not have pets to pictures of cats), this project will demonstrate how experience actually induces change in cognitions.

The project will add to our understanding of how experience influences cognitive development both by observing the effect of naturally occurring differences in experience on infants' learning, and by testing the effect of experimentally enhancing infants' experience on their learning. In addition, this project may contribute to our understanding of atypical development and how to intervene with infants at risk for atypical development. That is, although disorders such as Williams Syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorder develop over time, there is little understanding of what events occur in infancy that influence the outcomes for children with such disorders. Because atypical attention to and visual scanning of images of people and faces are characteristic of these disorders, it is possible that experiences in infancy contribute to the particular developmental trajectory of children with these disorders. A comprehensive understanding of how experience contributes to typical development may be important for both future investigations of such neurodevelopmental disorders and understanding how altering children's experience may help protect them from some of the outcomes associated with such disorders. The results of this work will be broadly disseminated, not only to the scientific community, but also to parents and child care professionals through lectures to parenting groups, participation at the Yolo County Child Development Conference, and television and radio.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Human-animal interactions have been studied for decades, characterizing the quality of such interactions and the effect they have on psychological functioning such as self-esteem and how people deal with grief. This work has extended to childhood, showing that many of the beneficial effects of relationships with companion animals observed with adults are also true in children. However, little is known about infants' relationships and interactions with animals, and how such experiences contribute to development. It is unknown, for example, how parents encourage or shield infants from interactions with companion animals, and whether interactions with animals contributes to infants' rapidly developing mental functioning. Therefore, a complete understanding of human-animal interactions, and how such interactions influence development, requires characterizing infants' experiences with companion animals. Characterizing infants' interactions and relationships with animals is also important because infant development is shaped by their experience-they learn the language they hear, the kind of faces they look at, and to interact with the kinds of objects in their environment. Moreover, differences in experience can have a profound effect on healthy development. Children who are raised in institutions, in poverty, or without a caring attentive caregiver have different developmental outcomes than children who are raised under other conditions. One common difference between children is the presence of pets in the home. Examining variations in infants' experience with pets, and how those variations contribute to their developing cognitions about animals, provides a model for systematically studying environmental influences on infant development as well as provides much needed information about the quality and quantity of infants' experience with companion animals. Although infants' perception of and learning about animal stimuli has been studied for decades, there has been little attempt to relate this learning to their experience with pets in the home. These previous studies have provided significant understanding into infants' basic perception of animals, revealing that by 3 to 4 months infants have sophisticated abilities to discriminate between, remember, categorize a wide variety of animals. Recently, infants' experience with pets in the home has been recognized as a potential contributor to this early development. This project will provide detailed information characterizing the quality and quantity of infants' interactions with animals through interviews with parents (Experiment 1), parental responses to questionnaires (Experiment 2), and observations in the home (Experiment 3). The effect of differences in infants' interactions will be examined by evaluating how infants with different experiences visually scan naturalistic scenes of infants in everyday activities in the presence of animals (Experiment 4). The results of these experiments will add to our understanding of human-animal interactions across the lifespan and begin to uncover the ways in which relationships with companion animals contributes to infants' development.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recent work has characterized aspects of visual short-term memory (VSTM) in infancy, uncovering dramatic, rapid developmental change in the first postnatal year. In real-world cognitive tasks, however, VSTM is not used in isolation-it is used to plan eye-movements, information that is attended is encoded in VSTM, and information stored in VSTM is compared with currently available information. Although such interactions are well established in adults, at present we know little about such interactions in infancy. Moreover, there is an increasing realization in the field of cognitive development that solely understanding the development of abilities in isolation does not provide a complete understanding of how such abilities develop. As skills and abilities develop, they likely create opportunities to practice, scaffold, and creating opportunities to use other emerging skills, both enhancing infants' use of the emerging skill and promoting additional development of that skill. Therefore, an important step in our understanding of the early development of VSTM is to examine how VSTM is used and co-develops with other cognitive skills and abilities. The relation between attention and VSTM is particularly important for several reasons. First, powerful and bi-directional relations between VSTM and attention have been uncovered in adults. In adults, information that is attended is encoded in VSTM, and information encoded in VSTM can direct attention in visual search, planning eye-movements, and making comparisons between remembered and now visible scenes. Second, VSTM undergoes rapid and dramatic developmental change between 6 and 8 months, precisely when other work has shown large changes in attentional control. Thus, the two cognitive skills develop along similar timescales. Third, attention and VSTM are subserved by the same underlying brain regions. Thus, as these regions develop, we would expect developmental changes in both these abilities. Finally, attentional strategies may help infants overcome the overwhelming amount of information that they encounter in each moment, facilitating their use of VSTM in cluttered visual scenes. Work with adults has shown that individual differences in attentional strategies are related to individual differences in VSTM capacity. And, work with infants suggests that they can use a salient cue to help focus attention on only one item in a scene. The proposed work will build on the rich foundation of previous work examining VSTM and attention in isolation. The focus will be on the transition between 6 and 10 months, a time when both VSTM and attentional processes undergo rapid and significant change. To examine how the contents of VSTM control attention, this project will use eye-tracking methods to investigate the role of VSTM in eye-movements and visual search (Experiments 1 and 2). To examine how attentional cueing contributes to VSTM encoding, this project will use both preferential looking and eye-tracking methods to examine infants' change detection in cluttered visual scenes-in this case, arrays of multiple items (Experiments 3 and 4). Finally, to examine the co-development of these abilities, this project will assess longitudinally VSTM and attentional abilities (Experiment 5). Together, these experiments will add considerably to our understanding of the typical development of this critical cognitive ability.

Every day, infants encounter an enormous amount of new information. Every new object, person, or place introduces new sights, sounds, and experiences to interpret, learn, and remember. Infants are remarkably good at learning new information, especially when it occurs during interactions with parents or caregivers. Many times each day, adults point out and name new objects in books or in the environment, talk to infants about those objects, and describe how objects are similar or different. Research has shown that this type of interaction helps older children learn about the world around them. This project is aimed at understanding the kind of support for learning (often referred to as scaffolding) that parents provide for their infants, and how this scaffolding actually helps infants learn.

Eight- to fourteen-month-old infants and their parents will engage in a picture-book reading task that involves introducing two novel object categories. The instructional strategies used by parents and the dynamics of these interactions will be analyzed. Infant category learning will be subsequently tested using a paired-comparison novelty preference paradigm. In a follow-up study, instructional strategies will be experimentally manipulated to test predictions regarding optimal learning conditions. Thus, this project will allow understanding of how parents' strategies facilitate infants' learning of specific features of the world.

This work not only provides insight into how infants learn, but may also inform ways in which parents or caregivers can better structure learning contexts for infants at risk for later problems. The results of this work will be broadly disseminated, not only in the scientific community, but also to parents and childcare professionals through social and traditional media, lectures given to parenting groups, and participation in the Yolo County Child Development Conference.

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The development of quantitative processing has been studied for decades, at least from the time of seminal studies by Piaget on children's reasoning about number and quantity. Beginning with now-classic studies conducted in the 1980s, there has been significant interest in the origins of such reasoning in infancy. Many of these studies are motivated by a desire to understand the core number systems that infants have, and to document infants' precocious abilities to process information about quantity. It is time for a shif in focus, so we can understand the development of these abilities in infancy. The existing literature provides mixed results and few clear answers for why the findings are mixed. It is clear that infants are sensitive to number and quantity. What is less clear is how this sensitivity develops, and how infants focus on some dimensions, such as exact number, and ignore other dimensions, such as total area. Understanding this development is important for several reasons. Effective functioning in the world depends on quantitative reasoning. Even infants need to be sensitive to quantity to make decisions about how to act, track objects, and accurately represent the world around them. In addition, advances in science and technology require strong quantitative abilities, and numerical abilities in infancy and early childhood may be related to quantitative abilities later in childhood. Finally, numerical processing is impaired n a number of developmental disorders, such as William's Syndrome and Fragile X syndrome. A complete understanding of such disorders-and the development of interventions to help children cope with impairments-requires a complete understanding of typical development. Although infants' visual number processing has been studied for decades, there remains little understanding into how this ability develops. Studies have asked whether or not infants attend to number or other features of displays, and what conditions encourage infants' attention to number. These important studies document infants' ability, but have yielded limited understanding into how these processes develop. Research with adults has revealed that processing of small sets of numbers is closely related to other visual attentional and perceptual processes. Thus, it is possible that infants' processing of small sets is also related to those visual cognitive abilities. This project asks how the development of number processing can be understood by relating this processing to other aspects of visual processing. This project will aim to uncover the development of infants' attention to number versus total area (Experiment 1). This is an important question because it will provide understanding into how infants' balance their attention to multiple visual features. Understanding how infants' balance and control their attention in this way has been the topic of research in other domains. The proposed project, therefore, will allow closer ties to those other domains. In addition, this project will examine ho individual differences in number processing are related to individual differences in other cognitive abilities (Experiment 2). Number processing does not happen in isolation. We determine how many items are present while perceiving the items, attending to them, forming memories of them. In addition, some of these other processes may be important for visual number processing (i.e., recognizing how many items are present depends on perceiving the items as individual items). Thus, a complete understanding of number processing requires examining how number processing is related to other visual cognitive processes.

Mental rotation, the ability to mentally manipulate a visual representation of an object and recognize its appearance from a different orientation, shows stability from infancy through preschool. This ability predicts mathematical achievement in kindergarten and beyond as well as entry into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The present work focuses on identifying how non-spatial processes contribute to mental rotation abilities. Findings will help identify ideal time points for intervention, advance understanding of the factors that contribute to mental rotation, and address how individual differences in mental rotation during infancy predict later abilities. This work will involve the creation and refinement of measures that can be used to trace the development of mental rotation from infancy into preschool; thereby, not only contributing new tools to the field, but also yielding insights that can inform current theoretical conceptions of mental rotation and its relation to non-spatial processes.

The critical research question is as follows: What are the non-spatial processes that contribute to mental rotation abilities and their development? Associations between mental rotation, object features, processing bias, and motor experience will be examined using a cross-sequential design with overlapping age cohorts. The investigators will recruit an infant cohort at 8 months, a toddler cohort at 20 months, and a preschool cohort at 3 years. Each cohort will be assessed at three time points -- every six months for infants (i.e., 8, 14, and 20 months), every 8 months for toddlers (i.e., 20, 28, and 36 months), and every year for preschoolers (3, 4, and 5 years). When examined at a specific age, the sample will provide a snapshot into the association between mental rotation and non-spatial skills (i.e., object features, processing bias, and motor experience). The longitudinal design will allow the investigators to follow participants across infancy, toddlerhood, or the preschool years. This approach provides an opportunity to understand how non-spatial skills, such as more precocious motor skills during infancy, may shape mental rotation over time. Such findings are central to bolstering understanding of the possible mechanisms by which particular types of experiences can promote infants' mental rotation. This, consequently, has implications for promoting academic achievement and remediating existing discrepancies in spatial and mathematical skills in children from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Project Summary There is a significant gap in our knowledge in the field of infant cognition, namely little is known about the development of visual processing in complex visual arrays in healthy development. The long-term objective of this project is to provide understanding into the nature of the development of infants? looking and visual processing, as well as to uncover relations between infants? looking and learning. That is, because infants rely even more heavily than do adults on visual processing to gain information about the world, understanding the factors that influence where and how long infants look, as well as how those factors determine what infants learn, is critical for a complete understanding of healthy development. To accomplish this objective we will undertake 2 specific aims. First the research team will conduct work aimed at understanding infants? learning to look. By examining how factors such as meaning, salience, and familiarity determines where and how long infants look, we gain understanding into the factors that influence visual processing, as well as how the development of the visual system helps infants balance competing influences on looking. Second, the research team will conduct work aimed at understanding infants? looking to learn. Infants? looking behavior is active and allows them to sample information about the visual world. By investigating how differences in infants? looking behavior translates to differences in what infants learn and remember about visual arrays, we can construct an understanding of how changes in in the visual system influence what infants learn about the visual world. By accomplishing these aims the research team will not only gain insight into the typical development of the visual system in healthy infants, but also will provide insight into points of vulnerability in that development and how multiple factors influence that development. In addition, because the research team will use complex visual arrays, such as natural scenes, this work will provide information about how looking and learning from looking develops in contexts that mimic the infants? everyday experience as well as make connections with work conducted with adults.