Maternal Teaching During Play With Four-Year-Olds: Variation by Ethnicity and Family Resources

Mothers’ spontaneous teaching of their 4-year-olds was observed during block play in 230 dyads from low-income African American, Mexican, Dominican, and Chinese backgrounds. Blocks contained graphics that could be used to teach concepts in literacy, math, construction, or body/color. Coders noted how often mothers taught each of the concepts, and whether they taught at basic (“This is an ‘A’”) or advanced (“C-a-t spells cat”) levels. Additionally, mothers’ negative and positive affect and feedback were coded. Ethnic differences were seen in the concepts that mothers taught, the levels of their teaching, and the amount and valence of mothers’ feedback and affect towards their children. Within immigrant families, English-language use was positively associated with amount of teaching, engagement in advanced teaching, and feedback to children. The sociodemographic characteristics of families shape parents’ structuring of learning opportunities for children and in turn influence children’s developing skills and school readiness

The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

Between 6 and 10 months of age, infants become better at discriminating among native voices and human faces and worse at discriminating among nonnative voices and other species’ faces. We tested whether these unisensory perceptual narrowing effects reflect a general ontogenetic feature of perceptual systems by testing across sensory modalities. We showed pairs of monkey faces producing two different vocalizations to 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-month-old infants and asked whether they would prefer to look at the corresponding face when they heard one of the two vocalizations. Only the two youngest groups exhibited intersensory matching, indicating that perceptual narrowing is pan-sensory and a fundamental feature of perceptual development

Neural correlates of perceptual narrowing in cross-species face-voice matching

Integrating the multisensory features of talking faces is critical to learning and extracting coherent meaning from social signals. While we know much about the development of these capacities at the behavioral level, we know very little about the underlying neural processes. One prominent behavioral milestone of these capacities is the perceptual narrowing of face–voice matching, whereby young infants match faces and voices across species, but older infants do not. In the present study, we provide neurophysiological evidence for developmental decline in cross-species face–voice matching. We measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while 4- and 8-month-old infants watched and listened to congruent and incongruent audio-visual presentations of monkey vocalizations and humans mimicking monkey vocalizations. The ERP results indicated that younger infants distinguished between the congruent and the incongruent faces and voices regardless of species, whereas in older infants, the sensitivity to multisensory congruency was limited to the human face and voice. Furthermore, with development, visual and frontal brain processes and their functional connectivity became more sensitive to the congruence of human faces and voices relative to monkey faces and voices. Our data show the neural correlates of perceptual narrowing in face–voice matching and support the notion that postnatal experience with species identity is associated with neural changes in multisensory processing (Lewkowicz & Ghazanfar, 2009)

The significance of textures for affective interfaces

Abstract. This paper reports experiments demonstrating that the extent to which subjects ascribe emotions to VR faces is highly dependent on textures applied to the face. We demonstrate this for both a photo-realistic vs. non-photo-realistic texture pair and for a male vs. female texture pair. In both cases, experiments were conducted over the Internet on still frames taken from a well-controlled VR emotion modelling system. Given the enormous extent to which textures determine emotion recognition, we consider this a critical area for future research in affective virtual agents.