Intellectual Merit: The results from this project has has significantly contributed to our understanding of infant behavioral and neural development during the first year of life.

We conducted longitudinal investigations that followed infants across the second half of the first year of life to better understand the extent to which infants learn from shared book reading with parents.  In one of these experiments we found that when parents read infants books with specifically labeled names for faces, or objects, infants learn more and show more specialized brain responses. This is in contrast to books with no labels or books with the same generic label under each image in the book. More specifically, we reported that when infants were given 3 months of shared book reading experience with books in which novel objects were labeled with individual-level names, they increased their attention to these objects as well as new objects they had never seen before. Consistent with other reports, this study suggests that for infants, finding books that name different characters may lead to higher quality shared book reading experience and result in the learning and brain development benefits we have reported. In addition, learning from 6-9 months of age was shown to impact both behavioral and brain measures 3 years later in children highlighting the importance of early learning on later child development.

Results from this project have also begun to uncover the complexities underlying how specific experiences during infancy lead to better recognition of faces within familiar groups relative to unfamiliar groups (i.e., other-race effect/bias). Previous findings suggest that although early in infancy babies can tell apart people within multiple races, with development and experience, their face recognition abilities become tuned to groups of people they interact with the most, a process we have called “perceptual narrowing”. Findings from across two cross-sectional investigations and one longitudinal investigation specifically identified the lack of individual-level labeling/naming as an important contributor to perceptual narrowing and the development of face processing biases. 

Perceptual narrowing may also influence infants’ abilities to utilize other aspects of face processing, such as emotion recognition and their ability to make inferences about social intentions. Two experiments within this project found that the decline in ability to recognize other-race faces during infancy impacts the ability 1) to perceive facial emotions and accurately match emotion sounds with images of emotion faces and 2) to follow eye gaze cues to learn about objects.  We also found that infants shift their processing of face-related emotion information from anterior to more posterior neural regions from 5- to 9-months of age. This shift in neural processing is noteworthy because it suggests that perceptual narrowing may be the result of a shift in processing from attention based systems to perceptually based systems, not simply just a refinement of a broad perceptual system. This work led to a recently published model, I-MAP (Interactive Model of Attention and Perceptual Learning), to account for the development of the other-race face bias.  I-MAP  proposes a mechanistic interaction between the development of attention systems and perceptual learning that is impacted by developmental tasks including: visual, language, and motor development, as well as the development of attachment relationships.

Broader Impacts: The overarching educational goal of this project was to increase women and underrepresented minority participation in developmental cognitive neuroscience. Trainees at several levels were involved in this project including 2 White female post-doctoral fellows, 2 White female graduate students, a White female international visiting graduate student, an Black American female and an Black American male graduate student, a Southeast Asian male graduate student, over 25 undergraduates of multiple races and ethnicities, and an Black American male high school student. In addition to being involved in the research, this project implementing a summer research experience program that aimed to introduce high school, undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students to scientific inquiry in cognitive neuroscience and methods used to study brain development. This program assisted aspiring young scientists in developing their academic and career goals, facilitated and encouraged students to form mentoring relationships and networks, and taught students about the importance of community outreach, education, and the responsible dissemination and communication of research findings. An evaluation of this summer program suggested it was effective at promoting professional development and that peer mentoring was a particularly important factor for self-reported program satisfaction.  

In addition to training impacts, results from this project have been disseminated broadly through conference and invited presentations, published journal articles, a series of press-releases and several media interviews, two Science 360 spotlights, and most recently an article published in The Conversation highlighting the importance of early infant-parent book reading that was published in over 50 local, national, and international news outlets.   

Last Modified: 06/26/2018
Modified by: Lisa S Scott