Filling in the gaps: Event segmentation is robust to missing information

Fluent event processing involves segmenting streaming sensory information into discrete units. Adults and childrenselectively attend to these meaningful moments within event streams, which predicts later memory. In natural environments,however, uninterrupted attention is unlikely. Consequently, some information is missed, including event boundary information.To what extent does missing information alter the attentional dynamics of processing, specifically viewers’ ability to targetremaining boundaries with enhanced attention? Adults advanced at their own pace through slideshows of unfolding activity.Slides were systematically deleted to enable comparison of viewers’ attentional dynamics when specific content was presentversus absent. Average dwelling per slide increased with missing content. However, the attentional dynamics of processingwere unaltered; attention to boundaries displayed comparable enhancement regardless of missing content. Attention modulationduring processing of relatively familiar events appears to be highly robust to missing information. What occurs with more novelevents is an interesting question for future research

Preregistration of secondary data analysis:A template and tutorial

Multivariate analysis of psychological dat

Post-publication critique at top-ranked journals across scientific disciplines: a cross-sectional assessment of policies and practice

Journals exert considerable control over letters, commentaries and online comments that criticize prior research (post-publication critique). We assessed policies (Study One) and practice (Study Two) related to post-publication critique at 15 top-ranked journals in each of 22 scientific disciplines (N = 330 journals). Two-hundred and seven (63%) journals accepted post-publication critique and often imposed limits on length (median 1000, interquartile range (IQR) 500–1200 words) and time-to-submit (median 12, IQR 4–26 weeks). The most restrictive limits were 175 words and two weeks; some policies imposed no limits. Of 2066 randomly sampled research articles published in 2018 by journals accepting post-publication critique, 39 (1.9%, 95% confidence interval [1.4, 2.6]) were linked to at least one post-publication critique (there were 58 post-publication critiques in total). Of the 58 post-publication critiques, 44 received an author reply, of which 41 asserted that original conclusions were unchanged. Clinical Medicine had the most active culture of post-publication critique: all journals accepted post-publication critique and published the most post-publication critique overall, but also imposed the strictest limits on length (median 400, IQR 400–550 words) and time-to-submit (median 4, IQR 4–6 weeks). Our findings suggest that top-ranked academic journals often pose serious barriers to the cultivation, documentation and dissemination of post-publication critique

A Unified Approach to Demographic Data Collection for Research with Young Children Across Diverse Cultures

Culture is a key determinant of children’s development both in its own right and as a measure of generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants’ demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in child development research. A barrier to reporting demographic data in a consistent fashion is that no standardized tool currently exists to collect these data. Variation in cultural expectations, family structures, and life circumstances across communities make the creation of a unifying instrument challenging. Here, we present a framework to standardize demographic reporting for early child development (birth to 3 years of age), focusing on six core sociodemographic construct categories: biological information, gestational status, health status, community of descent, caregiving environment, and socioeconomic status. For each category, we discuss potential constructs and measurement items and provide guidance for their use and adaptation to diverse contexts. These items are stored in an open repository of context-adapted questionnaires that provide a consistent approach to obtaining and reporting demographic information so that these data can be archived and shared in a more standardized format

Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed-speech preference

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure. (This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 798658.

A multilab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multisite study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multilab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared preference for North American English (NAE) IDS in lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 384 monolingual infants tested in 17 labs in seven countries. The tested infants were in two age groups: 6 to 9 months and 12 to 15 months. We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and the two groups did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, among bilingual infants who were acquiring NAE as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference. These findings extend the previous finding from ManyBabies 1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger IDS preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes similar contributions to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments

Pupillometry as a Window on the Role of Motionese in Infants’ Processing of Dynamic Activity

Over the first few years of life, infants acquire the ability to make sense of, predict, respond to, remember, and learn from a variety of everyday human actions. Finding segmental structure within unfolding activity – in particular, boundaries at which units of action begin and end – seems key to the acquisition of such action-processing fluency, and has important downstream implications for cognitive and linguistic development (e.g., Levine et al., 2018). However, action unfolds rapidly and is just as quickly gone. How do infants find structure in the complex, dynamic, fleeting action that they observe? Caregivers’ infant-directed action demonstrations might serve to help with this challenging task. In interactions with infants, caregivers modify their motion in a variety of ways that engage infants’ overall attention (i.e., “motionese;” Brand, Baldwin, & Ashburn, 2002). It seems likely that these modifications additionally highlight and promote infants’ processing of the internal structure of action. This dissertation explores the influence of motionese on infants’ online processing of action. We first created a corpus of infant- and adult-directed activity sequences. Next, we use a recently-developed, open source, inexpensive, infant-friendly methodology to measure infants’ pupil dilation as they viewed a select subset of these videos. We found that infants’ pupil size (an indication of attention or cognitive engagement) increased in response to action boundaries, but only for motionese demonstrations. Thus, in addition to engaging overall attention, motionese likely serves to promote infants’ processing of action’s internal structure. These findings set the stage for future work targeting the source of this increased pupil dilation at boundary regions. In sum, this work makes several important contributions to developmental science. First, we have created a large, open video corpus of caregiver-infant interactions. We have also validated a new methodology for addressing any number of novel questions about infants’ processing of visual information as it unfolds over time. Finally, this work provides the first demonstration to date that motionese influences infants’ on-line action processing, and in this way scaffolds their understanding of, and ability to learn from, dynamic, novel activity