Alecia Moser

They can interact, but can they learn? Toddlers' transfer learning from touchscreens and television.

Despite the ubiquity of touchscreen applications and television programs for young children, developmental research suggests that learning in this context is degraded relative to face-to-face interactions. Most previous research has been limited to transfer of learning from videos, making it difficult to isolate the relative perceptual and social influences for transfer difficulty, and has not examined whether the transfer deficit persists across early childhood when task complexity increases. The current study examined whether the transfer deficit persists in older children using a complex puzzle imitation task constructed to investigate transfer from video demonstrations. The current test adapted this task to permit bidirectional transfer from touchscreens as well. To test for bidirectional transfer deficits, 2.5- and 3-year-olds were shown how to assemble a three-piece puzzle on either a three-dimensional magnetic board or a two-dimensional touchscreen (Experiment 1). Unidirectional transfer from video was also tested (Experiment 2). Results indicate that a bidirectional transfer deficit persists through 3 years, with younger children showing a greater transfer deficit; despite high perceptual similarities and social engagement, children learned less in transfer tasks, supporting the memory flexibility account of the transfer deficit. Implications of these findings for use of screen media (e.g., video, tablets) in early education are discussed.

The Dimensional Divide: Learning from TV and Touchscreens During Early Childhood

As children’s exposure to touchscreen technology and other digital media increases, so does the need to understand the conditions under which children are able to learn from this technology. The prevalence of screen media in the lives of young children has increased significantly over the last two decades. The use of touchscreen devices among 2–4-year-olds in the USA increased from 39 to 80 % from 2011 to 2013 (Rideout, 2013). Despite frequent engagement with these devices, it is widely recognized that children exhibit a transfer deficit, a term coined to denote children’s consistently poorer learning from television and touchscreens relative to face-to-face interaction (see Barr, Developmental review 30(2):128–154, 2010; Barr, Child Development Perspectives 7(4):205–210, 2013). In this chapter, we focus on understanding the transfer deficit when children engage in imitative learning from touchscreens and television (e.g., Dickerson et al., Developmental Psychobiology 55(7):719–732, 2013, Moser et al., Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 137:137–155, 2015; Zack et al., British Journal of Developmental Psychology 27(Pt 1):13–26, 2009, Zack et al., Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 54(1):20–25, 2013; Zimmermann et al., Child Development, in press). Specifically, we discuss the role of child experience, perceptual and cognitive constraints, transfer distance, and social scaffolding in the transfer deficit. We conclude with lessons for parents and early educators regarding the strategies that may enhance learning across the dimensional divide.

Do semantic contextual cues facilitate transfer learning from video in toddlers

Young children typically demonstrate a transfer deficit, learning less from video than live presentations. Semantically meaningful context has been demonstrated to enhance learning in young children. We examined the effect of a semantically meaningful context on toddlers’ imitation performance. Two- and 2.5-year-olds participated in a puzzle imitation task to examine learning from either a live or televised model. The model demonstrated how to assemble a three-piece puzzle to make a fish or a boat, with the puzzle demonstration occurring against a semantically meaningful background context (ocean) or a yellow background (no context). Participants in the video condition performed significantly worse than participants in the live condition, demonstrating the typical transfer deficit effect. While the context helped improve overall levels of imitation, especially for the boat puzzle, only individual differences in the ability to self-generate a stimulus label were associated with a reduction in the transfer deficit.

The development of contour processing: evidence from physiology and psychophysics.

Object perception and pattern vision depend fundamentally upon the extraction of contours from the visual environment. In adulthood, contour or edge-level processing is supported by the Gestalt heuristics of proximity, collinearity, and closure. Less is known, however, about the developmental trajectory of contour detection and contour integration. Within the physiology of the visual system, long-range horizontal connections in V1 and V2 are the likely candidates for implementing these heuristics. While post-mortem anatomical studies of human infants suggest that horizontal interconnections reach maturity by the second year of life, psychophysical research with infants and children suggests a considerably more protracted development. In the present review, data from infancy to adulthood will be discussed in order to track the development of contour detection and integration. The goal of this review is thus to integrate the development of contour detection and integration with research regarding the development of underlying neural circuitry. We conclude that the ontogeny of this system is best characterized as a developmentally extended period of associative acquisition whereby horizontal connectivity becomes functional over longer and longer distances, thus becoming able to effectively integrate over greater spans of visual space.

Age-related changes in visual contour integration: Implications for physiology from psychophysics

Visual contour detection is enhanced by grouping principles, such as proximity and collinearity, which appear to rely on horizontal connectivity in visual cortex. Previous experiments suggest that children require greater proximity to detect contours and that, unlike adults, collinearity does not compensate for their proximity limitation. Over two experiments we test whether closure, a global property known to facilitate contour detection, compensates for this limitation. Adults and children (3-9 years old) performed a 2AFC task; one panel contained an illusory contour (closed or open) in visual noise, and one only noise. The experiments were identical except proximity was doubled in Exp. 2, enabling shorter-range spatial integration. Results suggest children are limited by proximity, and that closure did not reliably improve their performance as it did for adults. We conclude that perceptual maturity lags behind anatomy within this system, and suggest that slow statistical learning of long-range orientation correlations controls this disparity.

The Role of the Human Mirror Neuron System in Supporting Communication in a Digital World

Humans use both verbal and non-verbal communication to interact with others and their environment and increasingly these interactions are occurring in a digital medium. Whether live or digital, learning to communicate requires overcoming the correspondence problem: There is no direct mapping, or correspondence between perceived and self-produced signals. Reconciliation of the differences between perceived and produced actions, including linguistic actions, is difficult and requires integration across multiple modalities and neuro-cognitive networks. Recent work on the neural substrates of social learning suggests that there may be a common mechanism underlying the perception-production cycle for verbal and non-verbal communication. The purpose of this paper is to review evidence supporting the link between verbal and non-verbal communications, and to extend the hMNS literature by proposing that recent advances in communication technology, which at times have had deleterious effects on behavioral and perceptual performance, may disrupt the success of the hMNS in supporting social interactions because these technologies are virtual and spatiotemporal distributed nature.