Co-regulation of movements during infant feeding

The process by which infants move from liquid feeding to caregiver-assisted spoon feeding of semi-solid food is quite a dramatic transition. In previous studies, we observed that in the weeks after the introduction to solid food, mother-infant dyads showed increased co-regulation and synchronization of their respective feeding behaviors (e.g. offering food, accepting/refusing, timing). Learning this new way of feeding and eating requires that infants coordinate their position and movements with the complementary position and movements of the caregiver. The present study augments the category-based analysis of this co-regulation by the analysis of coupling in the dyads based on automatically extracted movement data. Previously collected video data from 10 mother-infant dyads were re-analyzed for the purpose of this study. Movement trajectories of mother’s hand and infant’s face were obtained by applying an automatic movement detection algorithm (TLD, Kalal et al., 2012; for applications to mother-infant interactions see López Pérez et al., 2017). Coordination was assessed by the method of Diagonal Cross Recurrence Profiles (DCRP), which expresses the degree of synchronization at different time lags. Profiles for each dyad from two different occasions --with one visit in the first week of solid feeding and one approximately 4–5 weeks later-- were compared. The results showed that, on average, most synchronization occurred in the first visit at lag 0. In the second visit there was an average delay in synchronization of about 1 s, with leading behavior starting from the infant. This suggests that the coordination was initially closely synchronized and became somewhat looser over time. Possibly, infants have begun to anticipate and guide the feeding movements enacted by the mother. However, our findings underline the idiosyncratic and complex nature of co-regulation of movements during the introduction of solid food. Whereas some dyads showed signs of increased organization, others seemed to disorganize, re-organize, or showed no organization at all. Many (interacting) factors --both individual and contextual-- may be responsible for the observed differences between dyads. Further research is needed to understand why specific synchronization pathways emerge and whether and how these might relate both to later feeding and eating and to the emergent patterns of participation

Beyond fixation durations: Recurrence quantification analysis reveals spatiotemporal dynamics of infant visual scanning

Standard looking-duration measures in eye-tracking data provide only general quantitative indices, while details of the spatiotemporal structuring of fixation sequences are lost. To overcome this, various tools have been developed to measure the dynamics of fixations. However, these analyses are only useful when stimuli have high perceptual similarity and they require the previous definition of areas of interest (AOIs). Although these methods have been widely applied in adult studies, relatively little is known about the temporal structuring of infant gaze-foraging behaviors such as variability of scanning over time or individual scanning patterns. Thus, to shed more light on the spatiotemporal characteristics of infant fixation sequences we apply for the first time a new methodology for nonlinear time-series analysis—the recurrence quantification analysis (RQA). We present how the dynamics of infant scanning varies depending on the scene content during a "pop-out" search task. Moreover, we show how the normalization of RQA measures with average fixation durations provides a more detailed account of the dynamics of fixation sequences. Finally, we link the RQA measures of temporal dynamics of scanning with the spatial information about the stimuli using heat maps of recurrences without the need for defining a priori AOIs and present how infants’ foraging strategies are driven by the image content. We conclude from our findings that the RQA methodology has potential applications in the analysis of the temporal dynamics of infant visual foraging offering advantages over existing methods

Three time-scales of influence between linguistic and conceptual processing: grammatical gender effects in Polish and Italian

An increasing number of studies show that syntactic features of language influence processing of information about objects and events, although the issues of universality and depth of such influences continue to fuel debates. This study compared effects of grammatical gender on the description of objects in two languages, Polish and Italian, that differ in the number of grammatical gender categories and in the systematicity of mapping between grammatical gender and natural gender of human referents. Combining two methods previously employed by research on this topic, we used an adjective description task followed by an Osgood-type rating of the collected adjectives. Grammatical gender effects were found in both languages. Previous findings, suggesting that semantic effects are weaker for languages with 3 genders, were not confirmed, prompting a search for other decisive factors. Importantly, the effects of grammatical features probed by our task can be understood as acting on different time-scales: the on-line influence of the processing of linguistic material, the ontogenetic time-scale of concept formation in the presence of linguistic input, and, finally, the time-scale of cultural language evolution. Depending on the experimental task adopted, effects from different time-scales may interact which is rarely taken into account by existing explanatory models

Understanding "Compositionality" in Research on Language Emergence

*** This paper has been accepted as a poster with full paper publication to the 2023 Annual Cognitive Society Meeting in Sydney, Australia. Please cite the published version: Rorot, W., & Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. (2023). Understanding "Compositionality" in Research on Language Emergence. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 45. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tg5d31m *** The goal of this paper is to analyze the notion of “compositionality” and its use in contemporary cognitive science. We argue that the concept has undergone a series of apparently minor definitional shifts since its initial inception within the field of philosophy of language (as indicated by Janssen, 2012). These changes result in a divergent meaning of the term as it is used in the emergent communication and language evolution communities. Hitherto, this fact has been underappreciated, whereas we believe that it has significant implications for understanding the nature of syntax and the sources of linguistic and conceptual structure. We argue that originally, “compositionality” was understood as pertaining primarily to the process of understanding a compound utterance by a hearer. Other scholars, however, take it to be a prerequisite of the structure of languages. In all contexts, investigating compositionality of natural languages requires making a host of idealizing assumptions. For this reason, we propose to understand compositionality as just one idealized principle influencing the construction of compound expressions in language, necessarily complemented by other principles. This allows for appreciating the structural entanglements permeating natural language and opens new avenues for accounting for them

Co-regulation of movements during infant feeding

The process by which infants move from liquid feeding to caregiver-assisted spoon feeding of semi-solid food is quite a dramatic transition. In previous studies, we observed that in the weeks after the introduction to solid food, mother-infant dyads showed increased co-regulation and synchronization of their respective feeding behaviors (e.g. offering food, accepting/refusing, timing). Learning this new way of feeding and eating requires that infants coordinate their position and movements with the complementary position and movements of the caregiver. The present study augments the category-based analysis of this co-regulation by the analysis of coupling in the dyads based on automatically extracted movement data. Previously collected video data from 10 mother-infant dyads were re-analyzed for the purpose of this study. Movement trajectories of mother’s hand and infant’s face were obtained by applying an automatic movement detection algorithm (TLD, Kalal et al., 2012; for applications to mother-infant interactions see López Pérez et al., 2017). Coordination was assessed by the method of Diagonal Cross Recurrence Profiles (DCRP), which expresses the degree of synchronization at different time lags. Profiles for each dyad from two different occasions --with one visit in the first week of solid feeding and one approximately 4–5 weeks later-- were compared. The results showed that, on average, most synchronization occurred in the first visit at lag 0. In the second visit there was an average delay in synchronization of about 1 s, with leading behavior starting from the infant. This suggests that the coordination was initially closely synchronized and became somewhat looser over time. Possibly, infants have begun to anticipate and guide the feeding movements enacted by the mother. However, our findings underline the idiosyncratic and complex nature of co-regulation of movements during the introduction of solid food. Whereas some dyads showed signs of increased organization, others seemed to disorganize, re-organize, or showed no organization at all. Many (interacting) factors --both individual and contextual-- may be responsible for the observed differences between dyads. Further research is needed to understand why specific synchronization pathways emerge and whether and how these might relate both to later feeding and eating and to the emergent patterns of participation