The pupil collaboration: A multi-lab, multi-method analysis of goal attribution in infants.

The rise of pupillometry in infant research over the last decade is associated with a variety of methods for data preprocessing and analysis. Although pupil diameter is increasingly recognized as an alternative measure of the popular cumulative looking time approach used in many studies (Jackson & Sirois, 2022), an open question is whether the many approaches used to analyse this variable converge. To this end, we proposed a crowdsourced approach to pupillometry analysis.

Validation of an open source, remote web-based eye-tracking method (WebGazer) for research in early childhood.

Measuring eye movements remotely via the participant's webcam promises to be an attractive methodological addition to in-person eye-tracking in the lab. However, there is a lack of systematic research comparing remote web-based eye-tracking with in-lab eye-tracking in young children. We report a multi-lab study that compared these two measures in an anticipatory looking task with toddlers using WebGazer.

But that's possible! Infants, pupils, and impossible events.

Infants' expectations of the world around them have been extensively assessed through the violation of expectation paradigm and related habituation tasks. Typically, in these tasks, longer looking to impossible events following familiarisation with possible equivalents is taken to reflect surprise at their occurrence, thus revealing infants' knowledge. In this study, the role of learning during the task itself is explored by switching the archetypal approach on its head and familiarising infants to impossible events.

Visual exploration in adults: Habituation, mere exposure, or optimal level of arousal?

Exploration is one of the most powerful behaviours that drive learning from infancy to adulthood. The aim of the current study was to examine the role of novelty and subjective preference in visual exploration. To do this, we combined a visual exploration task with a subjective evaluation task, presenting novel and familiar pictures.

Children's (Mis)understanding of the Balance Beam (Online Edition).

The balance-scale task, proposed by Inhelder and Piaget, illustrates children understanding of weight-distance relationships. Piaget used the clinical interview method in order to investigate children's reasoning. Over the last five decades, Siegler's Rule-Assessment Approach has been used to explain children reasoning in the balance-scale task according to rules children would use to solve the task.

Prenatal maternal docosahexaenoic acid intake and infant information processing at 4.5mo and 9mo: A longitudinal study.

Previous research suggesting an association between maternal prenatal docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) intake and infant cognition has yet to assess whether there is a critical trimester for the observed effects. We used a comprehensive Food Frequency Questionnaire to estimate DHA levels during both the second and third trimesters of pregnancy, in a sample of 125 pregnant women. Infants were assessed at 4.

Pupillometry.

Unlabelled: Pupillometry is the study of changes in the diameter of the pupil as a function of cognitive processing. This review paper provides a brief historical overview of the study of pupillometry in cognitive science. The physiology of pupillary responses is introduced, leading to an outline of early pupillometry work, which began with the seminal work of Hess and Polt in the 1960s.

How do infants recognize joint attention?

The emergence of joint attention is still a matter of vigorous debate. It involves diverse hypotheses ranging from innate modules dedicated to intention reading to more neuro-constructivist approaches. The aim of this study was to assess whether 12-month-old infants are able to recognize a "joint attention" situation when observing such a social interaction.

Acoustic analysis of oral productions of infants later diagnosed with autism and their mother.

Research on early signs of autism in social interactions often focuses on infants' motor behaviors; few studies have focused on speech characteristics. This study examines infant-directed speech of mothers of infants later diagnosed with autism (LDA; n = 12) or of typically developing infants (TD; n = 11) as well as infants' productions (13 LDA, 13 TD). Since LDA infants appear to behave differently in the first months of life, it can affect the functioning of dyadic interactions, especially the first vocal productions, sensitive to expressiveness and emotions sharing.

Maternal docosahexaenoic acid intake levels during pregnancy and infant performance on a novel object search task at 22 months.

This study investigated maternal prenatal docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) intake and infant cognitive development at 22 months. Estimates for second- and third-trimester maternal DHA intake levels were obtained using a comprehensive Food Frequency Questionnaire. Infants (n = 67) were assessed at 22 months on a novel object search task.

Pupil diameter measurement errors as a function of gaze direction in corneal reflection eyetrackers.

Pupil dilation is a useful, noninvasive technique for measuring the change in cognitive load. Since it is implicit and nonverbal, it is particularly useful with preverbal or nonverbal participants. In cognitive psychology, pupil dilation is most often measured by corneal reflection eye-tracking devices.

Pupil Dilation and Object Permanence in Infants.

This paper examines the relative merits of looking time and pupil diameter measures in the study of early cognitive abilities of infants. Ten-month-old infants took part in a modified version of the classic drawbridge experiment used to study object permanence (Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985). The study involved a factorial design where angle of rotation and presence or absence of an object were crossed.

Pupillometry: A Window to the Preconscious?

The measurement of pupil diameter in psychology (in short, "pupillometry") has just celebrated 50 years. The method established itself after the appearance of three seminal studies (Hess & Polt, 1960, 1964; Kahneman & Beatty, 1966). Since then, the method has continued to play a significant role within the field, and pupillary responses have been successfully used to provide an estimate of the "intensity" of mental activity and of changes in mental states, particularly changes in the allocation of attention and the consolidation of perception.

Infant cognition: going full factorial with pupil dilation.

The violation-of-expectation (VOE) paradigm and related methods are the main tools used to study high-level cognition in preverbal infants. Infants' differential looking to conceptually implausible/impossible events has been used as an index of early cognitive competence in many areas, including object knowledge, physics, language, and number. However, an event's plausibility is commonly confounded with its perceptual novelty or familiarity, leading to a variety of interpretations for looking time data (Bogartz, Shinskey & Speaker, 1997).

Précis of neuroconstructivism: how the brain constructs cognition.

Neuroconstructivism: How the Brain Constructs Cognition proposes a unifying framework for the study of cognitive development that brings together (1) constructivism (which views development as the progressive elaboration of increasingly complex structures), (2) cognitive neuroscience (which aims to understand the neural mechanisms underlying behavior), and (3) computational modeling (which proposes formal and explicit specifications of information processing). The guiding principle of our approach is context dependence, within and (in contrast to Marr [1982]) between levels of organization. We propose that three mechanisms guide the emergence of representations: competition, cooperation, and chronotopy; which themselves allow for two central processes: proactivity and progressive specialization.

Neuroconstructivism.

Neuroconstructivism is a theoretical framework focusing on the construction of representations in the developing brain. Cognitive development is explained as emerging from the experience-dependent development of neural structures supporting mental representations. Neural development occurs in the context of multiple interacting constraints acting on different levels, from the individual cell to the external environment of the developing child.

Preschoolers out of adults: discriminative learning with a cognitive load.

This paper explores novel predictions from the spontaneous overtraining interpretation of human discrimination shift learning (Sirois & Shultz, 1998a). Results from six experiments where adults perform a discrimination shift task with or without a cognitive distractor are reported. In three experiments with a concurrent distractor task (Experiments 1A, 2A, and 3A), performance of adults is comparable to what would be expected from preschoolers performing only the learning task.

Modeling developmental cognitive neuroscience.

In the past few years connectionist models have greatly contributed to formulating theories of cognitive development. Some of these models follow the approach of developmental cognitive neuroscience in exploring interactions between brain development and cognitive development by integrating structural change into learning. We describe two classes of these models.

An interacting systems model of infant habituation.

Habituation and related procedures are the primary behavioral tools used to assess perceptual and cognitive competence in early infancy. This article introduces a neurally constrained computational model of infant habituation. The model combines the two leading process theories of infant habituation into a single functional system that is grounded in functional brain circuitry.

Autoassociator networks: insights into infant cognition.

This paper presents autoassociator neural networks. A first section reviews the architecture of these models, common learning rules, and presents sample simulations to illustrate their abilities. In a second section, the ability of these models to account for learning phenomena such as habituation is reviewed.

Models of habituation in infancy.

Research on infant cognition using habituation methods has sparked considerable controversy in recent years. At the core of the debates is the issue of whether infants have early (and possibly innate) conceptual understandings. This article reviews a range of computational models of habituation that might provide insights into such discussions.