Infant and Child Development
Studies of Infant Perception | Language Development | Intelligence
Studies of Infant Perception
Bornstein, Arterberry, Haynes, Leach, Mash
The capacity to categorize objects, events, and other aspects of experience lies at the core of adaptive, intelligent behavior. In this context, categorization refers to the treatment of discriminable entities as equivalent in some way. Without this ability, every distinct encounter with the environment would demand a unique response, a demand that would quickly exceed human capability. When treating similar entities as equivalent, functionally relevant information about each one can be stored in a unified manner instead of being stored redundantly across each instance. Furthermore, accessing the representations that are associated with a given category can furnish information about completely novel entities as soon as those entities are categorized. Because of its far-reaching adaptive significance, researchers are necessarily concerned with the origins and early development of categorization.
Object Recognition
Objects and their visual characteristics must be learned and internally stored so that we can use our visual experience on subsequent occasions. For decades researchers have used visual discrimination tasks to demonstrate that infants indeed are capable of storing visual representations of stimuli. Many questions still remain, however, about the form and utilization of these representations. For instance, how do infants align their direct perception with what they have stored in visual memory?
Addressing this question, we are examining how infants discriminate objects they are looking at from those they have seen before. By controlling how they were seen before, and how they are presented for comparison, we can learn about how objects are stored in infants' memory.
Object Categorization
Beyond the capacity to represent individual objects, early development must also enable the representation of classes and kinds of objects so that people can efficiently store and effectively generalize their knowledge about those objects. Using again a visual discrimination procedure, we are studying infants' ability to formulate categorically organized representations of different classes of individual objects.
In this work we developed a set of novel stimulus objects that belong to 2 different categories of overall appearance. Infants are given a chance to learn about members of one category, then are presented with a member of the other category for comparison. If most infants look longer at the novel-category objects, it suggests that they can form cohesive categorical representations of objects that they had otherwise not seen before coming to the lab.
Language Development in the Second Year of Life
The composition of young children's vocabularies in seven contrasting linguistic communities has been investigated. Mothers of more than 250 20-month-olds completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and for different vocabulary size groupings, children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. A follow-up study compared multiple characteristics of girls' and boys' vocabulary in six different linguistic communities - one urban and one rural setting in each of three countries. More than 250 mothers completed vocabulary checklists for their 20-month-old children. Individual variability was substantial within each linguistic community. Minimal cross-linguistic differences were found in children's vocabulary size; however, differences among languages in the composition of children's vocabularies appeared possibly related to cultural valuing of different categories of words. Ecological setting differences within cultures appeared in children's vocabulary size, even when the composition of children's vocabularies was examined: Children living in urban areas were reported by their mothers to say significantly more words than children living in rural areas. Girls had consistently larger vocabularies than boys.
We also explored vocabulary competence in more than 50 firstborn and secondborn sibling pairs when each child reached 2 years using multiple measures of maternal report, child speech, and experimenter assessment. Measures from each of the three sources were interrelated. Firstborns' vocabulary competence exceeded secondborns' only in maternal reports, not in child speech or in experimenter assessments. Firstborn girls outperformed boys on all vocabulary competence measures, and secondborn girls outperformed boys on most measures. Vocabulary competence was independent of the gender composition and, generally, of the age difference in sibling pairs. Vocabulary competence in firstborns and secondborns was only weakly related.
Intelligence in the Preschool Years
An analysis of preschool children's multiple intelligences is underway in the CFRS. To date we have examined the structure and organization of intelligence, differences in intelligences across subpopulations, the relations between intelligences and sociodemographic variables, concurrent associations between intelligences and other behavioral, cognitive, and social factors, individual differences in patterns of intelligences, and the effect of schooling on intelligences. For example, first, a 7 factor hierarchical structural equation model was tested. The model consisted of 16 indicator variables that each loaded on one of 6 first order factors (Bodily Kinesthetic, Spatial, Logical Mathematical, Linguistic, Narrative, and Interpersonal Intelligences), and these 6 first order factors loaded on a second order General Intelligence factor. The hierarchical model fit the data alone and when controlling for socioeconomic status, maternal verbal intelligence, and maternal age. The model also fit well for boys and girls. Factor scores were saved, and group differences were explored by gender and on subsets of first and secondborn siblings and adopted and non adopted children. Girls scored higher than boys on General Intelligence, Bodily Kinesthetic Intelligence, Interpersonal Intelligence, and Narrative Intelligence. No differences emerged between first and secondborn children on the 7 intelligences, and only one difference emerged between adopted and non adopted groups, with non adopted children scoring higher on Interpersonal Intelligence. Maternal hours of employment were significantly negatively correlated with General Intelligence, Linguistic Intelligence, Logical Mathematical Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence, and Interpersonal Intelligence (stronger negative correlations for boys than girls). The Hollingshead Index (SES) was significantly positively correlated with General Intelligence, Linguistic Intelligence, Logical Mathematical Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence, and Interpersonal Intelligence. General Intelligence, Numerate/Spatial Intelligence, Linguistic Intelligence, and Interpersonal Intelligence were related to self-perceptions of cognitive competence. Creativity was related to General Intelligence, Numerate/Spatial Intelligence, Linguistic Intelligence, Interpersonal Intelligence, and Narrative Intelligence, but more strongly for boys than for girls. Both internalizing and externalizing behavior were negatively correlated with General Intelligence, Linguistic Intelligence, Logical Mathematical Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence, and Bodily Kinesthetic Intelligence. Children who scored high on any intelligence tended to score at average or slightly below average on all other intelligences. Children who showed a deficiency in one Intelligence tended to score average or slightly above average in the others. Children who attended preschool outscored their counterparts who did not attend preschool in General Intelligence as well as Linguistic and Interpersonal Intelligence. However, when we controlled for sociodemographic factors that also distinguished preschool attendees from non attendees, we found that these differences in intelligence attenuated.
Dr. Bornstein is the Founding Editor of the journal Parenting: Science and Practice. He has edited the 5-volume Handbook of Parenting (2002), and has 8 volumes published, in press, or in production in the Monographs in Parenting Series.