Rachel Barr - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although infants are exposed to television for many hours per day during infancy, very little is known about its real behavioral impact. To date we know that by 14- to 18-months, infants can imitate simple actions they saw on television 1 day earlier. Their ability to imitate televised actions, however, lags significantly behind their ability to imitate those same actions that were demonstrated by a live model. The basis for this lag is unclear, but several possibilities are obvious. First, laboratory studies have used only very short single presentations, but in the real world, the same televised information is typically frequently repeated within a segment and presented on many occasions. Second, laboratory studies have not included features common to commercially available televised programs. Finally, laboratory studies have presented only an isolated piece of televised information, but in the real world, multiple pieces of information are typically presented at once. In three studies, independent groups of 12-, 15-, 18-, and 21-month-old will be exposed to live or videotaped demonstrations of target actions, and their imitation performance will be measured 24 hr later. In the first study, the number of repetitions of the target actions will be increased from 3 to 6 for the video group and will continue to be doubled until infants in the video group imitate the same number of actions as infants in the live group. In the second study, attention to and imitation of televised sequences containing sound effects and lively music will be measured. In the third study ways to increase generalization and transfer of knowledge gained from television to objects that differ in size or shape will be examined (1) by modeling the target actions on a variety of stimuli and (2) by modeling the target actions on one object after preexposure to two objects that differ in shape and/or color. In both cases, infants will be tested with the original object or one that differs in color and/or shape. The results will have important theoretical implications for infant memory processing of two-dimensionally presented information. They will also have important applied implications for developing effective educational programs for normal infants and intervention programs for compromised infants in this expanding digital world.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Project Summary Television viewing and picture-book reading are prevalent activities during toddlerhood (Rideout, Vandewater &Wartella, 2003). Parents and teachers assume that toddlers'can easily learn from these symbolic media by transferring new information from books or television to the corresponding real-world objects they encounter in their daily lives. For example, one would expect that a child who is shown an armadillo in a book or on television would recognize it at the zoo sometime later. However, making this connection may be quite difficult for toddlers. Based on Hayne's (2004) representational flexibility hypothesis the degraded perceptual attributes of the symbolic representation may make learning from these media a challenging task for toddlers', especially when they are tested under difficult conditions (i.e., no narration, long delays, novel reminders). To date, however, very few empirical studies have explored the way in which toddlers learn from media exposure. Recent research shows that under some conditions toddlers'can relate the material presented from books and television to the corresponding real-world objects (Barr &Hayne, 1999;Meltzoff, 1988;Simcock &DeLoache, 2006). However, the range of conditions under which information learned from media is recalled has yet to be systematically explored. In the proposed research we will use an imitation paradigm to explore ecologically valid conditions under which toddlers'exhibit learning from media presentations. Imitation assesses higher cognitive skills and involves an adult modeling a series of target actions to the toddler who is later given an opportunity to reproduce them. First, we will examine the effect of narration on imitation from television and books. Second, we will examine the duration of retention for information learned from television and books. Third, we will examine the effect of reminders on the retention of information learned from television and books. The proposed research will have important theoretical implications for our understanding of the development of learning and memory from symbolic media in a range of challenging conditions. It will help inform parents, teachers and policy makers about the validity of claims that early exposure to books has positive effects on cognitive development whereas early television exposure has negative effects (APA, 1999). Finally, the research will have important practical implications for people working with toddlers as how to best design and use media as effective teaching tools. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: There is an increasing awareness of the public health implications of early exposure to television and books. Studies have demonstrated both positive and negative associations between media exposure and attention, sleep, and emotion regulation and school readiness. Direct investigation of the cognitive processing of symbolic content during toddlerhood warrants further investigation.

Young children watch television regularly. By two years of age, 90 percent of US children are viewing television on a daily basis. With support from the National Science Foundation, Rachel Barr, Ph.D., of Georgetown University and Peter Gerhardstein, Ph.D., of Binghamton University will examine in young children how memory and perceptual factors influence transfer of learning from television and touch screens. Early educational media experiences after two years of age can improve the well-being of children, preparing them for school entry and academic and social success. However, exposure to content that is not developed specifically for young children can have deleterious affects on development, resulting in aggressive behavior, consumerism, and attentional problems. An expanding range of two-dimensional devices, including touch screens (e.g., iPhone, iPad, etc.), are now ubiquitous. In order to learn from television and touch screens, children need to transfer information across contexts from two-dimensional images to real-life three-dimensional objects. Although the relationship between two-dimensional media content and the corresponding real three-dimensional referents is obvious to adults, that relationship is challenging for young children. They show less learning from television and touch screens than they do from live interactions, that is, a transfer deficit in learning. The goal of this project is to understand and ameliorate the transfer deficit. Children are shown how to make a puzzle on video, on a touch screen or 'live' with the real puzzle board, and then the children's ability to imitate those actions is tested either on a touch screen or with the real puzzle board. The research prediction is that learning from a touch screen is easier than learning from video, due to fewer cues being provided on video. Second, the expectation is that both repetition and practice ameliorate the transfer deficit effect, and that delay exacerbates it. Third, in order to examine perceptual factors, characteristics of the puzzle are systematically changed to add depth, details and context cues. The researchers predict that these additional cues can ameliorate the transfer deficit.

This research is leading to recommendations regarding when and under what circumstances the use of two-dimensional as opposed to three-dimensional (live) presentations can better address the needs of children in learning contexts at various points in development. Exploration of the helpful and deleterious factors, both perceptual and memory-based, that affect learning from screen media early in life can provide a better understanding of how to design programs to maximize young children's benefit from such experiences. If the transfer deficit can be ameliorated, digital delivery of information has the potential to be highly cost-effective in reducing barriers to school readiness. There are broad implications of this research for early education. Transfer of learning across content and context is a core of educational policy. It enables the development of flexible thinking. These studies will provide new theoretical rationale, garnered from highly controlled manipulations about the developmental course of the transfer of learning in the digital age. A stronger understanding of the development of this skill will aid in developing public policy regarding the expanding development for new electronic devices for the child market.

Two-thirds of the world's children are raised in homes where multiple languages are spoken. Children who learn two or more languages exhibit what appear to be lifelong cognitive advantages relative to those who learn only one language. In particular, bilingual children show heightened cognitive flexibility, defined as the ability to adjust their behaviors in response to changes in task demands, and inhibit their attention to irrelevant information. Cognitive flexibility is critical to educational success. The proposed studies will examine whether advantages in memory processing during infancy can explain bilingual children's heightened cognitive flexibility later in childhood. A better understanding of how and why bilingualism enhances cognitive flexibility will allow educators to develop pedagogical strategies to capitalize on bilingualism's protective cognitive strengths. This may be especially important for bilingual children from low income families who show an achievement gap relative to their middle class, monolingual peers.

Memory inference and memory flexibility will be tested in 1- and 2-year-old monolingual and bilingual children and these same children will be tested at 3- and 5-years on cognitive flexibility. Memory flexibility involves the ability to recognize similarities between objects based on how they function rather than how they look, which involves the ability to shift between cues. Memory interference occurs when competing cues disrupt memory encoding, and reduction of interference requires inhibition of conflicting cues. It is predicted that longitudinal analyses will show that bilingual infants have greater memory flexibility and less memory interference than monolinguals, which will predict enhanced cognitive flexibility at both 3 and 5 years. In addition, the PI is committed to training graduate and undergraduate students and will recruit bilingual students for their unique linguistic skills; the project is therefore likely to train minority students who are underrepresented in STEM fields.