Carol O. Eckerman

Toddlers' emerging ways of achieving social coordinations with a peer.

14 peer dyads were observed longitudinally at 16, 20, 24, 28, and 32 months to assess developmental changes in social coordinations (both action-to-action thematic relations and extended games). Each childs movements through the playroom, actions upon play material, vocalizations, verbalizations, and gestures were coded for their relation to the concurrent or immediately prior behavior of the peer: Unrelated, Tangential, Coordinated, Interfering. There was a marked increase with age in acts coordinated with those of a peer, and imitations of the peers nonverbal actions accounted for most of the developmental change. The use of words to direct the peer in a coordinated way increased with age but remained infrequent. Developmental change in the frequency of games paralleled that for imitative acts, and imitative acts both established and set the theme for most of the games. Thus, imitating anothers nonverbal actions is a core behavioral strategy for achieving social coordinations during the developmental period preceding reliance on verbal communication in peer interaction.

Nursery neurobiologic risk score : important factors in predicting outcome in very low birth weight infants

We developed a nursery Neurobiologic Risk Score (NBRS) based on potential mechanisms of brain cell injury in preterm infants and correlated it with developmental outcome at the corrected ages of 6, 15, and 24 months. The NBRS was determined at 2 weeks of age and at the time of discharge from intensive care in 58 preterm infants with birth weights less than or equal to 1500 gm. The NBRS correlated significantly with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, Mental Development Index (MDI) (r = -0.61 to -0.40) and Psychomotor Development Index (PDI) (r = -0.59 to -0.46), and with abnormal neurologic examination findings (r = 0.59 to 0.73) at the three testing periods. Although 12 of the 13 items composing the NBRS individually correlated with one or more outcome variables, seven items (infection, blood pH, seizures, intraventricular hemorrhage, assisted ventilation, periventricular leukomalacia, and hypoglycemia) accounted for almost all of the explained variance. Logistic regression of individual items demonstrated intraventricular hemorrhage to be the most important item for predicting the MDI at 24 months; pH was the most influential item for predicting the PDI at every testing period. A shorter, revised NBRS that included only the seven significant items demonstrated as strong a correlation with developmental outcome as the original NBRS. A revised 2-week score of greater than or equal to 5 or a discharge score of greater than or equal to 6 demonstrated 100% specificity and had a 100% positive predictive value for an abnormal outcome at 24 months of age in this group of infants. We conclude that the NBRS identifies during the intensive care nursery stay those infants at highest risk for an abnormal outcome related to nursery events. In addition, analysis of NBRS items provides insight into the relative importance of individual factors for influencing mental, motor, and neurologic outcome.

Mother – Child Conversational Interactions as Events Unfold: Linkages to Subsequent Remembering

The study reported here was designed to examine linkages between mother-child conversational interactions during events and childrens subsequent recall of these activities. In this longitudinal investigation, 21 mother-child dyads were observed while they engaged in specially constructed activities when the children were 30, 36, and 42 months of age. Analyses of the childrens 1-day and 3-week recall of these events indicated that at all age points, features of the activities that were jointly handled and jointly discussed by the mother and child were better remembered than were features that were either (1) jointly handled and talked about only by the mother, or (2) jointly handled and not discussed. Potential linkages were also explored between incidental memory for personal experiences and deliberate recall of familiar but arbitrary materials. In this regard, childrens recall of the special activities was positively correlated with their recall of objects in a deliberate memory task performed at 42 months.

Infant Arousal in an En-Face Exchange with a New Partner: Effects of Prematurity and Perinatal Biological Risk.

Very low birth weight (VLBW) infants of higher (n = 18) and lower (n = 29) perinatal biological risk were contrasted at 4 months adjusted age with healthy full-term infants (n = 32) in their arousal during a standardized peekaboo game with an examiner. VLBW infants showed less positive arousal, more negative arousal, and 3 mixtures of behavioral cues across the peekaboo game seldom seen for full-term infants-strong cues of both positive and negative arousal, strong cues of negative arousal alone, and no strong cues of either positive or negative arousal. Contrary to expectations, perinatal biological risk did not strongly predict variations in arousal within the VLBW group. Possible changes in how internal and external sources of arousal are integrated provide one explanation for the presence of strong relationships between perinatal biological risk and social responsiveness near term age and their disappearance by 4 months of age.

Premature newborns as social partners before term age

Abstract Very low birthweight (VLBW) newborns in simulated en face interaction prior to term age were assessed for their behavioral responsiveness to a female examiner who (a) simply maintained an en face position, (b) talked in motherese while maintaining an en face position, or (c) gradually added tactile stimulation to her talking. Talking led to increased eye opening and more time in an attentive state; the addition of touch to talking led to changes suggestive of distress— decreased eye opening and more facial grimacing. The 68 higher biological risk newborns (Neurobiologic Risk Score ≥ 10) showed the same patterns of responsiveness as the 96 lower risk newborns, but in a more exaggerated form. They responded to talking with even more prolonged eye opening and to the addition of touch with even more eye closing and facial grimacing, reflecting, perhaps, their greater reactivity and reduced abilities for self-regulation.

The ontogeny of human learning in delay, long-delay, and trace eyeblink conditioning.

The ontogeny of associative learning in delay (750-ms conditional stimulus [CS], 650-ms interstimulus interval [ISI]), long-delay (1,350-ms CS, 1,250-ms ISI), and trace (750-ms CS, 500-ms trace interval, 1,250-ms ISI) eyeblink conditioning was examined in 5-month-old human infants and adults. Infants and adults showed different acquisition rates but reached equivalent asymptotes of conditional responses (CRs) in standard delay conditioning. In long-delay and trace conditions, infants exhibited less robust conditioning than adults and minimal ability to appropriately time CRs. During infancy, the ISI, rather than the conditioning procedure, predicted rate and effectiveness of CRs. These findings suggest that higher order cognitive abilities begin emerging early in development. Across ontogeny, however, there are changes in the limits and parameters that support associative learning.

Nonverbal Imitation and Toddlers Mastery of Verbal Means of Achieving Coordinated Action.

Fourteen dyads of unfamiliar peers (White, both same gender and mixed gender) were observed longitudinally at 16, 20, 24, 28, and 32 months of age. Verbalizations to the peer were analyzed for their social function with respect to the ongoing nonverbal activity and their temporal and topical coherence to prior talk. Six types of speech (including verbal directives and topically well-connected speech) increased in frequency only after the peer partners had shown a marked increase in their readiness to imitate each others nonverbal actions. These same types of speech occurred reliably more often when the peers were engaged in bouts of coordinated action generated largely by means of nonverbal imitative acts than during bouts of less coordinated nonverbal activity. Toddlers, through their nonverbal imitative activity, appear to create joint understandings of what they are doing together that aid in their use and development of verbal means of achieving coordinated action.

The Toddler’s Emerging Interactive Skills

A socially skilled toddler might well be described by parents and teachers as a child who can achieve a variety of important social outcomes in ways approved of by such socialization groups as the family, school, and neighborhood playgroup. Attaining attention, comfort, affection, praise, information, and help from others, giving the same to others, cooperating with others in performing tasks, engaging in conventional games, carrying on conversation, generating games of pretend, resolving disputes, and forming and maintaining friendships might be among the important social outcomes mentioned. Reasonable as such a description of social skill may appear, our current knowledge of early social behavior falls far short of providing answers to the questions generated by such a description: How does the young child attain important social outcomes? How do the skills involved develop? How may the development of social skill go awry? The aims of the present chapter are three: (1) to provide a conceptualization of the type of skills required for attaining important social outcomes; (2) to summarize current knowledge about one set of such skills, that involved in cooperative play; and (3) to explore two research strategies for discovering and assessing the social skills of toddlers. First, however, a brief summary of other lines of research on early social development is required, since the present efforts rest upon these past accomplishments.

The preterm infant as a social partner: Responsive but unreadable

The behavioral responses of 16 very low birthweight premature infants and 16 full-term infants to social stimulation were assessed at the time of discharge from the hospital. Each infant was exposed to visual, auditory, tactile, and combined auditory and tactile social stimulation. Both groups of infants were found to be more motorically active and less visually responsive when tactually stimulated. Preterm infants differed significantly from full-term infants in their high frequency of body movement and arousal. The two groups did not differ in their ability to orient visually, sustain enface gaze and generally appear socially available. The results suggest a different pattern of response organization in the preterm infant; the infant is able to visually orient to a partner but unable to control erratic body movements, gasps and grunts, or frequent shifts in state. As a social partner, the preterm infant, though socially responsive, may not be “readable” by the caregiver.

Classical Delay Eyeblink Conditioning in 4- and 5-Month-Old Human Infants

Simple delay classical eyeblink conditioning, using a tone conditioned stimulus (CS) and airpuff unconditioned stimulus (US), was studied in cross-sectional samples of 4- and 5-month-old healthy, full-term infants. Infants received two identical training sessions, 1 week apart. At both ages, infants experiencing paired tones and airpuffs demonstrated successful conditioning over two sessions, relative to control subjects who had unpaired training. Conditioning was not evident, however, during the first session. Two additional groups of 5-month-olds received varied experiences during Session 1, either unpaired presentations of the CS and US or no stimulus exposure, followed by paired conditioning during Session 2. Results from these groups suggest that the higher level of conditioning observed following two sessions of paired conditioning was not the result of familiarity with the testing environment or the stimuli involved but, rather, the result of retention of associative learning not expressed during the first conditioning session.