Vanessa Lobue - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of the proposed research is to understand the developmental links between perception of motor action and the acquisition of motor skill. Experience is critical for planning motor actions adaptively. Previous research shows that novice crawling and walking infants do not accurately perceive possibilities for locomotion. They attempt to cross impossibly wide gaps and steep slopes. Over weeks of locomotor experience, action participation becomes increasingly adaptive. However, long before infants acquire independent mobility, they have opportunities to observe other people perform locomotor actions. The proposed experiments examine effects of locomotor experience on action participation and action observation. Infants at 8, 12, and 16 months of age will be tested on both a participation and an observation task. In the participation task, infants will decide whether to cross possible and impossible gaps. In the observation task, they will view displays of a model infant performing the same possible and impossible locomotor actions at the edge of a gap. The research has 2 specific aims. The first aim is to examine the relationship between action participation and action observation. That is, does accurate observation of a motor action develop before, concurrent with, or after infants'ability to guide those same actions adaptively? The second aim is to examine the independent effects of age and locomotor experience on the participation and observation of motor action. Normally, age and experience are confounded. However, in the proposed research, separate effects of age and experience will be assessed with an age-matched control design to compare prelocomotor and novice crawlers at the same chronological age (8 months), and experienced crawlers and novice walkers at the same chronological age (12 months). PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The results of the proposed studies have important implications for infants'perception of risky situations in which they are faced with the danger of falling. Falls are a common source of injury in young children, especially in infants who are just learning to crawl and to walk. A better understanding of the developmental relationship between action participation and action observation may suggest ways to decrease the frequency and severity of falling accidents.

Emotional facial expressions are very special for us as humans. We might see hundreds of faces in the course of a day and millions in the course of a lifetime. They can tell us when a situation is safe or risky, and they can give us important information about how to behave in everyday social interactions. Many researchers interested in studying human emotions rely on sets of photographs of adults posing the various emotional facial expressions. Although these sets provide us with a useful tool for studying emotions, they are limited in that they generally only include photographs of one specific demographic -- namely Caucasian adults. The current proposal introduces a brand new set of emotional facial expressions -- The Child Affective Facial Expression set (CAFE). The CAFE set includes photographs of 190 preschool children posing for 6 basic emotions -- sadness, happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, and fear -- plus a neutral expression. The set is also racially and ethnically diverse, featuring Caucasian, African American, Asian, Latino (Hispanic), and South Asian (Indian / Bangladeshi / Pakistani) children. The proposed experiments are aimed at validating this set so that it can be disseminated to the greater research community. In two experiments, 4-5-, 6-7-, 8-9- and 10-11-year-old children and a group of adults will be asked to identify each facial expression in the set twice. From these ratings a validity score (the accuracy of each participant) and a reliability score (the consistency of each participant between the two ratings) will be calculated for each facial expression.

Once the data have been collected, the CAFE set will be made available for free to the scientific community to use as a research tool. Given the prominence of research on emotional facial expressions, this stimulus set will promote scientific infrastructure and could contribute to several domains of psychological research, including developmental, social, cognitive, and clinical. Collectively the findings will result in a controlled, validated stimulus set of preschool-aged children making a variety of emotional facial expressions. Ultimately, research using this set could provide us with important insights into how we come to understand human emotions.

The proposed work assesses the efficacy of making among young children to determine the efficacy of Making: does it elicit enjoyment? Is that enjoyment related to meaningful learning? Teachers and developmental psychologists have advocated the importance of children's play in learning, but only relatively recently have scientists pointed to ways in which the active exploration of very young children supports learning. Like causal interventions informal science, in the course of play children spontaneously de-confound variables, explore unexpected outcomes, and take actions that reflect hypothesis testing.

The work leverages the core assumptions of Making -- children's play -- through the development of a "Mobile Maker Center" (MMC) that can be brought to local science museums, parks, zoos, or libraries to study children's interactions with STEM related toys. The work uses a novel approach to data gathering in the maker space, Databrary, to capture student engagement. MMC's are designed to facilitate developmentally appropriate themes for exploration, such as toys with levers and buttons (which teaches children about causality and hypothesis testing), a gear toy with removable parts (which teaches children about motor design and engineering explanations), and balance blocks (which teach children about the role of mass and length in scales and prediction).

Project Summary The adult and child clinical literature suggests that individuals who are clinically anxious or have high levels of trait anxiety show attention biases to threat. In addition, when these attention biases are experimentally manipulated in the lab, researchers can exacerbate or ameliorate levels of anxious thought and behavior. This has led researchers to argue that attention biases to threat may cause anxiety. However, the degree to which threat-related attention bias represents a down-stream result of ongoing anxiety or an early-emerging predisposing factor implicated in the risk for the development of anxiety disorders remains unclear. The studies highlighting the effectiveness of attention manipulation take a mechanistic view of the relation between attention and affect and are important proof of concept. However, they cannot elucidate how these information-processing biases actually develop over the course of childhood. Affect biased attention, the predisposition to preferentially attend to affective stimuli, may ?tune? initial attentional filters to seek out and identify threat, biasing subsequent information processing and behavioral enactment and serving as a foundational form of emotion regulation. Anxious adults and children show attention biases to threat, early temperament is associated with elevated levels of negative affect and anxiety, and normative patterns of preferential attention to threat are evident as early as the first year of life. However, we know little concerning how these inter-relations appear and change over time since much of the attention-affect literature (1) has focused on adult clinically-defined populations, (2) does not systematically assess both constructs across multiple tasks and contexts, and (3) rarely takes a developmental view that examines core mechanisms as they emerge in infancy and differentiate between normative patterns and patterns associated with specific risk factors. The current longitudinal study will employ three eye-tracking tasks that capture core components of attention in infants assessed at five time-points from 4 to 24 months of age. In addition, we will implement a rich assessment of temperamental negative affect, which is associated with the later emergence of anxiety and social withdrawal. Finally, we will assess known biopsychosocial markers of risk that probe neural (EEG), and parasympathetic (RSA) mechanisms. We will also examine moderating parent-centered mechanisms of socioemotional development. This line of research reflects the focus in the Research Domain Criteria on integrating multilevel mechanisms by examining response to potential threat (negative valence systems), attention patterns (cognitive systems) and early patterns of affect across varying socioemotional contexts (negative valence systems and social processes). We also go to the heart of NIMH's Objective 2, by characterizing trajectories of neural and behavioral development in order to identify clinically useful indicators of change across illness trajectories.

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.