Developmental Changes In Children Research Articles

Developmental differences in children and adults' enforcement of explore versus exploit search strategies in the United States and Turkey.

Across development, as children acquire a deeper understanding of their environment, they explore less and take advantage, or "exploit," what they already know. Here, we test whether children also enforce exploration-oriented search behaviors onto others. Specifically, we ask whether children are more likely to encourage a search agent to explore versus exploit their environment, and whether this pattern varies across childhood (between 3 and 6 years). We also ask whether this pattern differs between children and adults, and generalizes across two different sociocultural contexts-Turkey and the United States-that differ on dimensions that might relate to children's decisions about exploration (e.g., curiosity-focused educational practices, attitudes toward uncertainty avoidance). Participants (N=358) watched an agent search for rewards and were asked at various points whether the agent should "stay" (exploit) in their current location, or "go" (explore) to a new location. At all points in the experiment, children enforced exploration significantly more often than adults. Early in the agent's search, children in the US enforced exploration more often than children in Turkey; later in the search, younger children (from both sociocultural contexts) were more likely to continue enforcing exploration compared to older children. These findings highlight that children are not only highly exploratory themselves, but also enforce exploration onto others-underscoring the central role that exploration plays in driving early cognitive development across diverse sociocultural contexts. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: The current study examined developmental and cross-cultural differences in children and adults' enforcement of explore-exploit search strategies. Children in the US and Turkey enforced exploration more than adults, who enforced exploitation more often; results were generally consistent across cultures with small differences. Mirroring developmental changes in children's own search behavior; the tendency to enforce exploration decreased between 3- to 6-years of age. Findings underscore the central role of an "exploration mindset" in children's early decision-making-even when exploration has no direct benefits to the child themselves.

Parallel developmental changes in children’s production and recognition of line drawings of visual concepts

Childhood is marked by the rapid accumulation of knowledge and the prolific production of drawings. We conducted a systematic study of how children create and recognize line drawings of visual concepts. We recruited 2-10-year-olds to draw 48 categories via a kiosk at a children’s museum, resulting in >37K drawings. We analyze changes in the category-diagnostic information in these drawings using vision algorithms and annotations of object parts. We find developmental gains in children’s inclusion of category-diagnostic information that are not reducible to variation in visuomotor control or effort. Moreover, even unrecognizable drawings contain information about the animacy and size of the category children tried to draw. Using guessing games at the same kiosk, we find that children improve across childhood at recognizing each other’s line drawings. This work leverages vision algorithms to characterize developmental changes in children’s drawings and suggests that these changes reflect refinements in children’s internal representations.

Mechanical power and normalized mechanical power in pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Mechanical power (MP) refers to the energy transmitted over time to the respiratory system and serves as a unifying determinant of ventilator-induced lung injury. MP normalization is required to account for developmental changes in children. We sought to examine the relationship between mechanical energy (MEBW), MP normalized to body weight (MPBW), and MP normalized to respiratory compliance (MPCRS) concerning the severity and outcomes of pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome (pARDS). In this retrospective study, children aged 1 month to 18 years diagnosed with pARDS who underwent pressure-control ventilation for at least 24 h between January 2017 and September 2020 were enrolled. We calculated MP using Becher's equation. Multivariable logistic regression analysis adjusted for age, pediatric organ dysfunction score, and oxygenation index (OI) was performed to determine the independent association of MP and its derivatives 24 h after diagnosing pARDS with 28-day mortality. The association was also studied for 28 ventilator-free days (VFD-28) and the severity of pARDS in terms of OI. Out of 246 admitted with pARDS, 185 were eligible, with an overall mortality of 43.7%. Non-survivors exhibited higher severity of illness, as evidenced by higher values of MP, MPBW, and MEBW. Multivariable logistic regression analysis showed that only MEBW but not MP, MPBW, or MPCRS at 24 h was independently associated with mortality [adjusted OR: 1.072 (1.002-1.147), p = 0.044]. However, after adjusting for the type of pARDS, MEBW was not independently associated with mortality [adjusted OR: 1.061 (0.992-1.136), p = 0.085]. After adjusting for malnutrition, only MP at 24 h was found to be independently associated. Only MPCRS at 1-4 and 24 h but not MP, MPBW, or MEBW at 24 h of diagnosing pARDS was significantly correlated with VFD-28. Normalization of MP is better related to outcomes and severity of pARDS than non-normalized MP. Malnutrition can be a significant confounding factor in resource-limited settings.

Intervention of Development Stimulation and Nutrition Education of Complementary Feeding on The Growth and Development of Stunting Under-Free Children

The incidence of stunting under five is also related to the low level of knowledge in providing food intake that can meet children's needs. Appropriate intervention is expected to be able to deal with stunting incidents which can be irreversible at a later stage This study aimed to determine the effect of developmental stimulation interventions and providing MP-ASI nutrition education on stunted children under five. The design of this study was experimental with pre and post design. This study used educational media MP-ASI modules and stimulation, detection, early intervention of child growth and development (SDIDTK) by first conducting developmental screening using a developmental pre-screening questionnaire (KPSP). The intervention is carried out for 1 month. The subjects in this study were 44 stunted toddlers in Condong Village using a purposive sampling method. For data that were not normally distributed, the Wilcoxon test was used to determine the significance of the effect of the intervention, and for normally distributed data, a paired t-test was used. There were significant differences in the variables of weight, height, nutritional status, height/age, and energy intake of stunting toddlers before and after the intervention (p-value<0,05). However, there were no significant differences in the variables of protein, fat intake and child development (p-value>0,05). It is necessary to carry out further research related to the duration of providing child development stimulus to stunting toddlers, so that the results of changes in child development can occur significantly.

Younger, not older, children trust an inaccurate human informant more than an inaccurate robot informant.

This study examined preschoolers' trust toward accurate and inaccurate robot informants versus human informants. Singaporean children aged 3-5 years (N = 120, 57 girls, mostly Asian; data collected from 2017 to 2018) viewed either a robot or a human adult label familiar objects either accurately or inaccurately. Children's trust was assessed by examining their subsequent willingness to accept novel object labels provided by the same informant. Regardless of age, children trusted accurate robots to a similar extent as accurate humans. However, while older children (dis)trusted inaccurate robots and humans comparably, younger children trusted inaccurate robots less than inaccurate humans. The results indicate a developmental change in children's reliance on informants' characteristics to decide whom to trust.

Developmental changes in drawing production under different memory demands in a U.S. and Chinese sample.

Children's drawings of common object categories become dramatically more recognizable across childhood. What are the major factors that drive developmental changes in children's drawings? To what degree are children's drawings a product of their changing internal category representations versus limited by their visuomotor abilities or their ability to recall the relevant visual information? To explore these questions, we examined the degree to which developmental changes in drawing recognizability vary across different drawing tasks that vary in memory demands (i.e., drawing from verbal vs. picture cues) and with children's shape-tracing abilities across two geographical locations (San Jose, United States, and Beijing, China). We collected digital shape tracings and drawings of common object categories (e.g., cat, airplane) from 4- to 9-year-olds (N = 253). The developmental trajectory of drawing recognizability was remarkably similar when children were asked to draw from pictures versus verbal cues and across these two geographical locations. In addition, our Beijing sample produced more recognizable drawings but showed similar tracing abilities to children from San Jose. Overall, this work suggests that the developmental trajectory of children's drawings is remarkably consistent and not easily explainable by changes in visuomotor control or working memory; instead, changes in children's drawings over development may at least partly reflect changes in the internal representations of object categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The road to conventional tool use: Developmental changes in children's material engagement with artifacts in nursery school.

The development of tool use in early childhood is a topic of continuing interest in developmental psychology. However, the lack of studies in ecological settings results in many unknowns about how children come to use artifacts according to their cultural function. We report a longitudinal study with 17 sociodemographically diverse children (8 female) attending a nursery school in Madrid (Spain) and their two adult female teachers. Using mixed-effects models and Granger causality analysis, we measured changes in the frequency and duration of children's object uses between 7 and 17months of age and in the directional influences among pairs of behaviors performed by teachers and children. Results show a clear shift in how children use artifacts. As early as 12months of age, the frequency of conventional uses outweighs that of all other types of object use. In addition, object uses become shorter in duration with age, irrespective of their type. Moreover, certain teachers' nonlinguistic communicative strategies (e.g., demonstrations of canonical use and placing gestures) significantly influence and promote children's conventional tool use. Findings shed light on how children become increasingly proficient in conventional tool use through interactions with artifacts and others in nursery school.

Attitudes and motivation towards learning French in primary school

Abstract Young children have often been shown to be highly motivated towards learning foreign languages in primary school, but for their enthusiasm to decrease during secondary schooling. Many reasons have been put forward, such as novelty wearing off, teaching styles, or societal and peer pressure. Little is known about changes in attitudes and motivation in primary school aged children when these factors are kept constant, the only variable being the age of the children. The present study investigated differences in attitudes and motivation at two different ages (5 and 7) in such a setting. Two intact classes in the same school (53 children with no prior knowledge of French), taught the same material by the same teacher, took part in focus groups and one-to-one interviews during the course of a larger longitudinal project investigating the role of age in early classroom learning. Results show that changes in motivation might occur earlier than previously thought, and be shaped by developmental changes in children’s cognitive, social and emotional growth. Children as young as 5 and 7 were shown to exhibit differences in levels of self-regulation, self-efficacy, and thought and beliefs frames which had a direct impact on their attitudinal and motivational profiles.

Tracking what went where across toddlerhood: Feature-location bound object representations in 2- to 3-year-olds' working memory.

Two experiments examined the development of the ability to encode, maintain, and update integrated representations of occluded objects' locations and featural identities in working memory across toddlerhood. Sixty-eight 28- to 40-month-old US toddlers (13 Asian or Pacific Islander, 6 Black, 48 White, 1 multiracial; 40 girls; tested between February 2015 and July 2017) tracked the locations of different color beads that were hidden simultaneously (Experiment 1) or sequentially (Experiment 2). Toddlers' ability to reliably store feature-location bound object representations in working memory varied as a function of age, memory load, and task demands. These results bridge a developmental gap between infancy and early childhood and provide new insights into sources of limitation and developmental change in children's early object representational capacities.

Developmental changes in children's choices of practice strategies

This study investigated children's choices of deliberate practice strategies. Six-to 11-year-olds (n = 85) were presented with three outwardly similar motor tasks that varied only in the precision of the motor response required to succeed. Children then had the opportunity to practice these tasks before a “test” in which they had to complete all three tasks in the fastest overall time. While children of all ages spent relatively more time practicing the hardest task, only 10- and 11-year-olds scored more successes on the hardest task than the other tasks during the initial practice period. After verbal instruction, however, children of all ages scored more successes on the hardest task during practice, and younger children became more likely to persevere with the hardest task rather than switching tasks after a success. Children's practice choices may vary as a function of age and verbal instruction.

Parenting in the Context of the Child: Genetic and Social Processes.

The focus on the role of parenting in child development has a long-standing history. When measures of parenting precede changes in child development, researchers typically infer a causal role of parenting practices and attitudes on child development. However, this research is usually conducted with parents raising their own biological offspring. Such research designs cannot account for the effects of genes that are common to parents and children, nor for genetically influenced traits in children that influence how they are parented and how parenting affects them. The aim of this monograph is to provide a clearer view of parenting by synthesizing findings from theEarly Growth and Development Study (EGDS). EGDS is a longitudinal study of adopted children, their birth parents, and their rearing parents studied across infancy and childhood. Families (N = 561) were recruited in the United States through adoption agencies between 2000 and 2010. Data collection began when adoptees were 9 months old (males = 57.2%; White 54.5%, Black 13.2%, Hispanic/Latinx 13.4%, Multiracial 17.8%, other 1.1%). The median child age at adoption placement was 2 days (M = 5.58, SD = 11.32). Adoptive parents were predominantlyin their 30s, White, andcoming from upper-middle- or upper-class backgrounds with high educational attainment (a mode at 4-year college or graduate degree). Mostadoptive parents were heterosexual couples, andweremarried at the beginning of the project. The birth parent sample was more racially and ethnically diverse, but the majority (70%) were White. At the beginning of the study, most birth mothers and fathers were in their 20s, with a mode of educational attainment at high school degree, and few of them were married. We have been following these family members over time, assessing their genetic influences, prenatal environment, rearing environment, and child development. Controlling for effects of genes common to parents and children, we confirmed some previously reported associations between parenting, parent psychopathology, and marital adjustment in relation to child problematic and prosocial behavior. We also observed effects of children's heritable characteristics, characteristics thought to be transmitted from parent to child by genetic means, on their parents and how those effects contributed to subsequent child development. For example, we found that genetically influenced child impulsivity and social withdrawal both elicited harsh parenting, whereas a genetically influenced sunny disposition elicited parental warmth. We found numerous instances of children's genetically influenced characteristics that enhanced positive parental influences on child development or that protected them from harsh parenting. Integrating our findings, we propose a new, genetically informed process model of parenting. We posit that parents implicitly or explicitly detect genetically influenced liabilities and assets in their children. We also suggest future research into factors such as marital adjustment, that favor parents responding with appropriate protection or enhancement. Our findings illustrate a productive use of genetic information in prevention research: helping parents respond effectively to a profile of child strengths and challenges rather than using genetic information simply to identify some children unresponsive to current preventive interventions.

Developmental Changes in Children’s Object Insertions during Play

ABSTRACT Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children’s natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool years. We used an open-ended spatial play task to establish typically developing children’s behaviors from 12 to 48 months (N = 66, 36 girls). Specifically, we observed young children’s insertions into a commercially available shape sorter that included six geometric solids with corresponding apertures. Approaches to this task changed with age. Younger children primarily inserted solids into the large top opening, a strategy that did not require spatial alignment for success. Between 24 and 30 months, children shifted to inserting solids into their corresponding side openings, a more spatially and motorically difficult strategy that required aligning solids to their appropriate apertures. This pattern suggests that at 24 months, children begin to adopt more sophisticated strategies for this motor problem-solving task. Older children also completed a higher proportion of successful insertions compared to younger participants, and children successfully inserted rotationally symmetrical shapes (e.g., circle) at younger ages than rotationally asymmetrical shapes (e.g., triangle). This study represents an important first step in providing a detailed baseline of children’s natural play behaviors over a wide developmental period that can be used to inform how spatial and cognitive systems contribute to spatial play.

발달 지연 아동의 발달적 변화를 위한 조기중재 사례 연구 : 통합적 놀이치료 중재를 중심으로

This study aims to examine the effects of integrated play therapy on early intervention for developmental changes in children with developmental delays. Pre- and post-tests were conducted and compared to identify developmental changes. For integrated play therapy, the study analyzed progress monitoring and recording records with the following findings. First, a change was noted in intelligence quotient (71 → 84). Second, the intervention was conducted by integrating child-centered play therapy, thera play and cognitive-behavioral play therapy.

“Why Can't I See My Friends and Family?”: Children's Questions and Parental Explanations About Coronavirus

ABSTRACTQuestion‐explanation exchanges in parent–child interactions foster children's early learning, especially when children are inquiring about unobservable scientific phenomena such as the novel coronavirus (COVID‐19). As with other unobservable entities, children must rely on adults to acquire knowledge about COVID‐19. Yet, we know very little about what children understand about COVID‐19 or its consequences. In our study, we explored developmental changes in children's questions about COVID‐19 and parents' explanations. Parents (n = 182) of children (aged 3–8) completed an online survey, which included demographic information, parents' explanations, and children's questions. Parents' explanations referenced germs, used illness analogies, and mentioned mitigation strategies. Most of children's COVID‐related questions focused on the consequences of COVID‐19. Whereas older children asked more about death, younger children asked about loss of activities. The findings advance our understanding of the impact of COVID‐19 on parents and children.

Developmental change in children's speech processing of auditory and visual cues: An eyetracking study.

This study investigates how children aged two to eight years (N = 129) and adults (N = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from explicit behavioural measures. Participants were presented with familiar words in audio-visual (AV), audio-only (A-only) or visual-only (V-only) speech modalities, then presented with target and distractor images, and looking to targets was measured. Adults showed high accuracy, with slightly less target-image looking in the V-only modality. Developmentally, looking was above chance for both AV and A-only modalities, but not in the V-only modality until 6 years of age (earlier on /k/-initial words). Flexible use of visual cues for lexical access develops throughout childhood.

Pediatric Imaging of the Elbow: A Pictorial Review.

The elbow is a complex joint, subject to a wide range of traumatic, inflammatory, metabolic and neoplastic insults. The pediatric elbow has several diagnostic pitfalls due to the normal developmental changes in children. Knowledge of these normal variants is essential for both diagnosis and management of their elbow injuries. Radiography remains the first imaging modality of choice. Magnetic resonance imaging is excellent in evaluating lesions within the bone and soft tissues. In this pictorial essay, we provide insights into pediatric elbow imaging, show a range of entities specific to the pediatric elbow, and discuss diagnostic pitfalls that result from normal elbow growth in children.

Twelve-month-olds disambiguate new words using mutual-exclusivity inferences

Representing objects in terms of their kinds enables inferences based on the long-term knowledge made available through kind concepts. For example, children readily use lexical knowledge linked to familiar kind concepts to disambiguate new words (e.g., “find the toma”): they exclude members of familiar kinds falling under familiar kind labels (e.g., a ball) as potential referents and link new labels to available unfamiliar objects (e.g., a funnel), a phenomenon dubbed as ‘mutual exclusivity’. Younger infants' failure in mutual exclusivity tasks has been commonly interpreted as a limitation of early word-learning or inferential abilities. Here, we investigated an alternative explanation, according to which infants do not spontaneously represent familiar objects under kind concepts, hence lacking access to the information necessary for rejecting them as referents of novel labels. Building on findings about conceptual development and communication, we hypothesized that nonverbal communication could prompt infants to set up kind-based representations which, in turn, would promote mutual exclusivity inferences. This hypothesis was tested in a looking-while-listening task involving novel word disambiguation. Twelve-month-olds saw pairs of objects, one familiar and one unfamiliar, and heard familiar kind labels or novel words. Across two experiments providing a cross-lab replication in two different languages, infants successfully disambiguated novel words when the familiar object had been pointed at before labeling, but not when it had been highlighted in a non-communicative manner (Experiment 1) or not highlighted at all (Experiment 2). Nonverbal communication induced infants to recruit kind-based representations of familiar objects that they failed to recruit in its absence and that, once activated, supported mutual-exclusivity inferences. Developmental changes in children's appreciation of communicative contexts may modulate the expression of early inferential and word learning competences.

Are the classic false belief tasks cursed? Young children are just as likely as older children to pass a false belief task when they are not required to overcome the curse of knowledge.

The question of when children understand that others have minds that can represent or misrepresent reality (i.e., possess a 'Theory of Mind') is hotly debated. This understanding plays a fundamental role in social interaction (e.g., interpreting human behavior, communicating, empathizing). Most research on this topic has relied on false belief tasks such as the 'Sally-Anne Task', because researchers have argued that it is the strongest litmus test examining one's understanding that the mind can misrepresent reality. Unfortunately, in addition to a variety of other cognitive demands this widely used measure also unnecessarily involves overcoming a bias that is especially pronounced in young children-the 'curse of knowledge' (the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when considering less-informed perspectives). Three- to 6-year-old's (n = 230) false belief reasoning was examined across tasks that either did, or did not, require overcoming the curse of knowledge, revealing that when the curse of knowledge was removed three-year-olds were significantly better at inferring false beliefs, and as accurate as five- and six-year-olds. These findings reveal that the classic task is not specifically measuring false belief understanding. Instead, previously observed developmental changes in children's performance could be attributed to the ability to overcome the curse of knowledge. Similarly, previously observed relationships between individual differences in false belief reasoning and a variety of social outcomes could instead be the result of individual differences in the ability to overcome the curse of knowledge, highlighting the need to re-evaluate how best to interpret large bodies of research on false belief reasoning and social-emotional functioning.

Developmental changes in children’s recognition of the relevance of evidence to causal explanations

Identifying relevant evidence is necessary to evaluate scientific claims. Two studies explore how children ages 7–10 (n = 98) judge the relevance of different types of observations for evaluating the accuracy of a causal explanation, and how their judgments relate to domain-specific knowledge and other cognitive characteristics. All children recognized that observations involving the same entity and same underlying causal mechanism would be helpful for evaluating a claim. However, children ages 7–8 held a more fragile understanding than children ages 9–10 that observations involving a different entity but the same causal mechanism would be more helpful than observations involving the same entity but a different causal mechanism. Controlling for age, children’s biological knowledge also positively related to their recognition of the relevance of scientific evidence.

Transactional relations and reciprocity between refugee mothers and their children: changes in child, parenting, and concept of child

ABSTRACT Guided by the transactional approach, this grounded theory study examined the reciprocal relations between the effects of participation in a preschool education intervention program on Syrian refugee children and their mothers’ parenting practices and concept of child. 128 children participated in a school-based intervention program in resettlement communities in Turkey. 32 mothers were individually interviewed regarding their observations of and experiences with their children before and after intervention. Data were analyzed with various categorization, thematization, and trustworthiness techniques of grounded theory. Results show that participation in intervention yielded a variety of positive developmental changes in children which kicked off substantial changes in maternal practices and perceptions of child/childhood among their mothers. The emergent transactional model grounded in mothers’ voices captures three aspects of reciprocity that led to these changes: Remediation, redefinition, and reeducation. The study highlights the crucial and instrumental role of refugee children’s participation in ECEC support programs in reshaping and enhancing parental practices and their competence and capability to constructively impact on members of their proximal environments.