The development of social learning: from pedagogical cues to selective learning.

Learning new information from others, called social learning, is one of the most fundamental types of learning from infancy. Developmental studies show that infants likely engage in social learning situations selectively and that social learning facilitates infant information processing. In this paper, we summarize how social learning functions support human learning from infancy focusing on two aspects of social learning; pedagogical learning and selective learning.

Relationship between maternal grit and effortful control among 18-21-month-old toddlers.

Grit is known to be effective for long-term academic and social success. However, few studies have focused on the role of grit in parenting and its effect on the development of grit in children. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of maternal grit on children's effortful control (EC), which is thought to be a precursor to grit, using parenting as a mediating factor.

Brain structure variation and individual differences in theory of mind among older adults.

The theory of mind (ToM) is not substantially influenced by aging, suggesting the emergence of various compensatory mechanisms. To identify brain regions subserving ToM in older adults, we investigated the associations of individual differences in brain structure with performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), a widely used measure of ToM, using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS). In contrast to findings obtained from young adults, where multiple cortical regions are implicated in ToM, VBM analysis revealed a significant positive correlation between RMET score and gray matter (GM) volume only in the right middle temporal gyrus, a region implicated in social cognition.

The infant-doctor relationship: an examination of infants' distress reactions in the presence of a doctor.

Fear of doctors is a common source of distress among infants; however, the underlying sources of this distress are unknown. To investigate the doctor-infant relationship, the behaviors of 61 healthy infants (176-617 days old) were observed in a simulated examination room. Their behaviors and electrocardiograms were recorded.

Mealtime conversations between parents and their 2-year-old children in five cultural contexts.

Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children ( = 99 families) during mealtime across five cultural settings (Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Germany, and Japan) and coded the amount of talk and gestures as well as their conversational embedding (interlocutors, function, and themes).

Empathic embarrassment towards non-human agents in virtual environments.

Humans feel empathic embarrassment by witnessing others go through embarrassing situations. We examined whether we feel such empathic embarrassment even with robot avatars. Participants observed a human avatar and a robot avatar face a series of embarrassing and non-embarrassing scenarios.

Paternal involvement in infant care and developmental milestone outcomes at age 3 years: the Japan Environment and Children's Study (JECS).

Background: In developed countries, the time fathers spend on childcare has increased steadily in recent decades. However, studies on the relationship between paternal care and child outcomes remain scarce. Thus, we examined the association between paternal involvement in childcare and children's developmental outcomes.

Exploring role of sleep aids in sleep problems in preschool children.

It is well known that children use sleep aids, such as blankets or soft toys, at bedtime. However, there is a lack of understanding regarding the factors associated with their use and role in addressing sleep problems. This study investigated 96 Japanese children aged 40 to 47 months to examine these associations.

Visual attention across cultures: Similarities and differences in child development and maternal attention styles.

Previous cross-cultural research has described two different attention styles: a holistic style, characterized by context-sensitive processing, generally associated with interdependent cultural contexts, and an analytic style, a higher focus on salient objects, generally found in independent cultural contexts. Though a general assumption in the field is that attention styles are gradually socialized in culture-specific interactions in childhood, empirical evidence for the proximal mechanisms underlying this development is scarce. This study aimed to document the emergence of cross-cultural differences in attention styles in three cultural contexts differing in social orientations, namely in urban middle-class families from Münster, Germany (i.

A cross-cultural investigation of people's intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition.

Nature vs. nurture is an enduring theme of studies of the mind. Past studies on American children and adults have revealed a preference for thinking that even fundamental cognitive abilities documented in human infants and non-human species are late-emerging and reliant on learning and nurture.

Social reward anticipation in infants as revealed by event-related potentials.

Infants engage in gaze interaction from the early stage of life. Emerging studies suggest that infants may expect social reward of shared attention before looking to the same object with another person. However, it was unknown about the neural responses during the anticipation of social rewards before shared attention in infants.

Physiological arousal explains infant gaze following in various social contexts.

Gaze following (GF) is fundamental to central aspects of human sociocognitive development, such as acquiring language and cultural learning. Studies have shown that infant GF is not a simple reflexive orientation to an adult's eye movement. By contrast, infants adaptively modulate GF behaviour depending on the social context.

Development of a classifier to screen for severe sleep disorders in children.

This study aimed to develop an automatic classifier for the identification of severe sleep disorders that require immediate intervention in children. Our study assessed 7,008 children (age: 0-83 months) in Japan, whose parents and nursery teachers recorded their 14-day sleep patterns. Sleep quality was assessed by pediatricians and scored as 1 (no severe sleep disorder) or 0 (severe sleep disorder).

Pupil dilation predicts modulation of direct gaze on action value calculations.

Perceiving direct gaze facilitates social cognition and behaviour. We hypothesized that direct gaze modulates decision-making, particularly calculations of action values. To test our hypothesis, we used the reinforcement learning paradigm in situations with or without direct gaze.

Memory Monitoring and Control in Japanese and German Preschoolers.

Prior studies explored the early development of memory monitoring and control. However, little work has examined cross-cultural similarities and differences in metacognitive development in early childhood. In the present research, we investigated a total of 100 Japanese and German preschool-aged children's memory monitoring and control in a visual perception task.

Baby's Online Live Database: An Open Platform for Developmental Science.

Efficient data collection in developmental studies is facing challenges due to the decreased birth rates in many regions, reproducibility problems in psychology research, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we propose a novel platform for online developmental science research, the Baby's Online Live Database (BOLD), which extends the scope of the accessible participant pool, simplifies its management, and enables participant recruitment for longitudinal studies. Through BOLD, researchers can conduct online recruitment of participants preregistered to BOLD simply by specifying their attributes, such as gender and age, and direct the participants to dedicated webpages for each study.

Individual recognition of monkey (Macaca fuscata) and human (Homo sapiens) images in primatologists.

How experience affects the flexibility of facial identity recognition in adulthood is not fully understood. Primatologists are an interesting type of participants investigating facial identity recognition ability and flexibility because they can recognize individual primates based on their appearance, including body and facial features, through intense training during adulthood. Consequently, this study investigates the influence of primatological experience on individual recognition ability using eye-tracking techniques and sequential 2-alternative forced-choice matching tasks with images of humans (Homo sapiens) and Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata).

The role of executive functions in older adults' affective theory of mind.

Purpose: Executive function (EF) has three subsystems: inhibition, updating, and shifting. Of these three, only inhibition is considered to be involved in affective theory of mind (ToM). This study investigated whether inhibition remains the sole driver for affective ToM in the three EF subsystems in older adults as well as in young people without functional reorganization via aging within EF.

Great apes' understanding of biomechanics: eye-tracking experiments using three-dimensional computer-generated animations.

Visual processing of the body movements of other animals is important for adaptive animal behaviors. It is widely known that animals can distinguish articulated animal movements even when they are just represented by points of light such that only information about biological motion is retained. However, the extent to which nonhuman great apes comprehend the underlying structural and physiological constraints affecting each moving body part, i.

Source memory and social exchange in young children.

Reciprocal interactions require memories of social exchanges; however, little is known about how we remember social partner actions, especially during childhood when we start forming peer-to-peer relationships. This study examined if the expectation-violation effect, which has been observed in adults' source memory, exists among 5-6-year-old children. Forty participants played a coin collection game where they either received or lost coins after being shown an individual with a smiling or angry expression.

Cultural influences on face scanning are consistent across infancy and adulthood.

The emergence of cultural differences in face scanning is thought to be shaped by social experience. However, previous studies mainly investigated eye movements of adults and little is known about early development. The current study recorded eye movements of British and Japanese infants (aged 10 and 16 months) and adults, who were presented with static and dynamic faces on screen.

Affective priming enhances gaze cueing effect.

Other's gaze direction triggers a reflexive shift of attention known as the gaze cueing effect. Fearful facial expressions are further reported to enhance the gaze cueing effect, but it remains unclear whether this facilitative effect is specific to gaze cues or the result of more general increase in attentional resources resulting from affective arousal. We examined the effects of affective priming on the cueing effects of gaze and arrow stimuli in the Posner cueing task.

A Robot Is Not Worth Another: Exploring Children's Mental State Attribution to Different Humanoid Robots.

Recent technological developments in robotics has driven the design and production of different humanoid robots. Several studies have highlighted that the presence of human-like physical features could lead both adults and children to anthropomorphize the robots. In the present study we aimed to compare the attribution of mental states to two humanoid robots, NAO and Robovie, which differed in the degree of anthropomorphism.

Metacognition and mindreading in young children: A cross-cultural study.

Prior studies document cross cultural variation in the developmental onset of mindreading. In particular, Japanese children are reported to pass a standard false belief task later than children from Western countries. By contrast, we know little about cross-cultural variation in young children's metacognitive abilities.