Talks

There are two talk sessions (see schedule for details): Language Development and Visual Attention and Socialization, Emotion, and Cultural Interactions. Each session is 75 minutes, and presenters have 15 minutes to present, including time for questions.

Talk Session 1: Language Development and Visual Attention

Syntactic Category Bias in Early Bilingual Vocabularies

Alvin Tan, Stanford

Previous research (e.g., Frank et al., 2021) has established that many languages exhibit a positive noun bias, such that young children know more nouns than would be expected by chance (relative to predicates and function words), although the magnitude of this bias varies across languages. Relatively fewer studies have investigated these biases in bilingual populations, whereby the interaction between the two languages being acquired may result in different bias patterns. In this work, we conduct reanalyses of Communicative Development Inventory data from bilinguals, showing that syntactic category bias is not affected by the other language being acquired, but is affected by the cultural context of the child.

Estimating Age-Related Change in Infants’ Linguistic and Cognitive Development Using (Meta-)Meta-Analysis

Anjie Cao, Stanford

Developmental psychology focuses on how psychological phenomena emerge with age. In cognitive development research, however, the specifics of this emergence is often underspecified. Researchers often provisionally assume linear growth by including chronological age as a predictor in regression models. In this work, we aim to evaluate this assumption by examining the functional form of age trajectories across 25 phenomena in early linguistic and cognitive development using (meta-)meta-analysis. Surprisingly, for most meta-analyses, the effect size for the phenomenon was relatively constant throughout development. We investigated four possible hypotheses explaining this pattern: (1) age-related selection bias against younger infants; (2) methodological adaptation for older infants; (3) change in only a subset of conditions; and (4) positive growth only after infancy. None of these explained the lack of age-related growth in most datasets. Our work challenges the assumption of linear growth in early cognitive development and suggests the importance of uniform measurement across children of different ages.

From Pixels to Perception: Investigating Developing Visual Attention Through Convolutional Neural Networks

Shannon Klotz, UC Davis

For decades, studies have indicated that infants are more attentive to visually complex patterns, which feature multiple elements (Berlyne, 1958; Cohen et al., 1975; Horowitz et al., 1972; Hutt & McGrew, 1969). Defining visual complexity in natural scenes has often led to simplistic interpretations. We propose a novel quantitative model using AlexNet, a convolutional neural network inspired by the brain's object recognition pathway. This network processes images through layers that mimic increasing levels of complexity, quantifying scene complexity at various abstraction levels. Our study examined the gaze patterns of children from three age groups: 92 infants (4-12 months), 82 toddlers (12-48 months), and 47 preschoolers (12-36 months), who viewed digitized photographs of natural scenes. We correlated their gaze durations with activations in five specific AlexNet layers that represent different stages of visual processing, from basic shapes and colors to complex object classifications. Findings revealed that children’s gaze durations were generally longer for scenes triggering higher activations across all layers, suggesting a preference for more complex scenes. However, the pattern varied by age. Infants showed prolonged gaze only at higher activations in the early processing layers and not in the most abstract layer, FC3 (rs(2574) = 0.02, p = .23), indicating that the youngest infants focus more on physical characteristics than on abstract content. A developmental shift was noted; older infants preferred more complex images at the lower processing levels significantly more than younger infants (ß = .90, z = 8.81, p < .001). This aligns with the literature indicating that infants' attention evolves from being predominantly influenced by physical salience to being shaped by more complex, higher-order properties as they grow. Our results confirm that as children develop, visual complexity, defined through higher abstraction levels in neural processing, increasingly impacts their attention. This supports the use of models like AlexNet to quantitatively assess complexity in visual scenes and highlights significant developmental changes in visual preference.

Parent-Child Conversations about Science “Misconceptions”

Sam McHugh, UCSC

Abstract coming soon!

Talk Session 2: Socialization, Emotion, and Cultural Interactions

How Children Think About Religious Segregation in India

Victoria Keating, UC Berkeley

Abstract coming soon!

Infant-Centered Behavioral Response Patterns to Discrete Emotions

Zeynep Ozden, UC Merced

Responding to others’ emotions entails the coordination of multiple behaviors. Yet, research on such responding typically analyses each behavior separately. We investigated the heterogeneity of 16-, 19-, and 24-month-old infants’ (N = 296) behavioral response patterns to 5 discrete emotions (joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust) during a naturalistic interaction. Various infant behaviors (social avoidance, security seeking, stimulus exploration, prosocial responding, information seeking, relaxed play) in response to the emotional context were coded. A latent class analysis (LCA) was then used to reveal groups of individuals that shared commonalities in their behavioral response patterns across the sample. Next, a GLMM examined differences in class prevalence across discrete emotions, age groups, and across age groups within emotions. The LCA revealed 4 distinct classes of behavior patterns (Table 1): Prosocial Exploring (19.4%), Active Information Seeking (42.5%), Cautious Information Seeking (19.6%), and Relaxed Playing (18.3%). The GLMM revealed several interesting differences in the frequency of each class across emotions and ages. Notably, there was a main effect of emotion for Prosocial Exploring F(4, 365) = 3.40, p = 0.01, and Relaxed Playing F(4, 294) = 6.18, p < .001, a main effect of age for Relaxed Playing, F(2, 212) = 6.79, p = .001, and a significant interaction effect for Active Information Seeking F(8, 438) = 2.51, p = .01, and Cautious Information Seeking F(8, 320) = 3.05, p = .003. This is the first study to utilize an infant-centered analysis to identify subgroups of individuals with similar patterns of goal-directed behaviors in response to discrete emotions.

Emotion Brokering: Helping Others Navigate Intercultural Emotion-Based Misunderstandings

Sivenesi Subramoney, UC Merced

Communication difficulties are inevitable when individuals interact with members of a different culture. One source of miscommunication is when social partners misunderstand each other’s emotions. Although research has investigated how youth from immigrant families help others navigate linguistic misunderstandings, less is known on how individuals interpret culturally different emotion norms for others (i.e., emotion brokering). In this investigation we examined the emotion brokering experience among a Latinx college-aged sample, predominately from immigrant families. Study 1 (N = 68) examined participants’ descriptions of their emotion brokering experiences. Study 2 (N = 139) examined the relationships between the emotions (i.e., embarrassment, pride) experienced when emotion brokering and psychological adjustment (i.e., acculturative stress, depressive symptoms). Finally, Study 3 (N = 279) examined whether endorsement of emotion brokering as a family assistance behavior moderated the relationship between the emotions experienced when emotion brokering and psychological adjustment. In Study 1, qualitative thematic-coding revealed that emotion brokering frequently involved misunderstandings of: (a) another’s emotion expression, (b) what elicited another’s emotional expression, or (c) how someone regulated their emotion. Study 2 demonstrated that embarrassment and pride moderated the relationship between emotion brokering frequency and psychological adjustment. Study 3 demonstrated that endorsement of emotion brokering as a family assistance behavior moderated the relationships between the emotions experienced when emotion brokering and psychological adjustment. Findings suggest that helping others navigate intercultural emotion differences can be emotionally impactful. Furthermore, findings have important implications for psychological adjustment among bicultural youth who serve as emotion brokers.

Does Current Ecological Relevance Attenuate the Effects of Chaotic Home Environments on Children’s Inhibitory Control Performance?

Diego Placido, UC Davis

Unpredictable home environments are associated with reduced inhibitory control (IC) in youth (Fields et al., 2021). IC requires monitoring for contextual signals and stopping an ongoing action (Chatham et al., 2012). Other cognitive control abilities, particularly working memory updating, are enhanced under more ecologically relevant conditions, especially for youth exposed to environmental adversity (Young et al., 2022). We integrated these findings to investigate whether children from chaotic home environments exhibited reduced IC and whether such differences were attenuated under more ecologically relevant conditions. Fifty-eight 5–8-year-old children completed a Go/No-Go task (Durston et al., 2002). They were instructed to press a button in response to each image except the ‘No-Go’ image. Stimuli in the Abstract condition were geometric shapes and the No-Go stimulus was assigned, whereas stimuli in the Relevant condition reflected activities in children’s everyday lives and children selected the No-Go stimulus. Home chaos was indexed using the CHAOS (Matheny et al., 1995). Inhibitory control performance was significantly higher under ecologically relevant conditions compared to abstract conditions. While ecologically relevant conditions do not meet traditional standards of significance for attenuating the effects of home chaos on children’s IC performance, home chaos has a trending negative association with IC performance. Our preliminary conclusions highlight how standard traditional measurements, that discount the relevance of real-world representations in task design, may underestimate children’s potential in behavioral performance, and the possibility that more targeted measures of the environment may be needed to capture characteristics that shape inhibitory control through systems involved in detecting changing conditions, such as unpredictability—which has been considered a fundamental feature of the developmental environment.

Young Children’s and Caregivers’ Evaluations about Household Helping in the U.S.

Margie Martinez, UCSC

Young children’s helping can benefit the helper more than the receiving parent. This study examined how children and their caregivers incorporate the helper and recipient interests in evaluations of household helping. U.S. 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 87; 47 girls, 40 boys; 71% European American, 23% Asian American, 14% Latinx, 3% Black, and 2% Native American) and their caregivers evaluated whether a child in hypothetical scenarios should help their parent. Children’s judgments and reasoning incorporated both helper and recipient interests, whereas caregivers’ responses weighed the interests of the helping child more heavily. Caregiver judgments about obligation predicted children’s judgments. Findings suggest that perceptions of whose interests are served shape judgments and decisions around young children’s prosocial behaviors at home.