We introduce a novel method to test a classic idea in developmental science that children's attention to a stimulus is driven by how much they can learn from it. Preschoolers (4-6 years, M=4.6) watched a video where a distracting animation accompanied static, page-by-page illustrations of a storybook. The audio narration for each storybook page…

The cognitive mechanisms and benefits of active learning in early child development are poorly understood. The current study investigated 20-23-month-old infants' curiosity-driven information selection in a novel word learning task, designed to identify any potential advantage for active learning over passive learning. In a gaze-contingent…

Visual attention develops rapidly across the first postnatal year, from reflexive eye movements driven by low-level stimulus properties to increasingly voluntary eye movements influenced by higher-order factors. To test the hypothesis that development reflects guidance by increasingly abstract features, we used representational similarity analysis…

Questions about early word knowledge pervade the literature on both typical and atypical language trajectories. To determine which words an infant knows, researchers have relied on two types of measures--caregiver-report and eye-gaze behavior. When these measures are compared, however, their results frequently fail to converge, making it difficult…

Research has shown that infants are curious and actively seek situations from which they can learn. For instance, a recent eye-tracking study demonstrates that babies tend to allocate their attention to stimuli that offer opportunities for learning new information. Interestingly, however, the degree to which attention is guided by information gain…

Words direct visual attention in infants, children, and adults, presumably by activating representations of referents that then direct attention to matching stimuli in the visual scene. Novel, unknown, words have also been shown to direct attention, likely via the activation of more general representations of naming events. To examine the critical…

Recent work has investigated the origin of infant colour categories, showing pre-linguistic infants categorise colour even in the absence of colour words. These infant categories are similar but not identical to adult categories, giving rise to an important question about how infant colour perception changes with the learning of colour words. Here…

Sustained attention (SA) is an endogenous form of attention that emerges in infancy and reflects cognitive engagement and processing. SA is critical for learning and has been measured using different methods during screen-based and interactive contexts involving social and nonsocial stimuli. How SA differs by measurement method, context, and…

Studies in low-resource settings suggest that multiple aspects of early childhood development are sensitive to the relative poverty of a child's environment. We examined whether direct, quantitative measures of early developing cognitive functions show a similar association with relative poverty. Eye movement latencies were recorded in children at…

Children's gaze behavior reflects emergent linguistic knowledge and real-time language processing of speech, but little is known about naturalistic gaze behaviors while watching signed narratives. Measuring gaze patterns in signing children could uncover how they master perceptual gaze control during a time of active language learning. Gaze…

Object names are a major component of early vocabularies and learning object names depends on being able to visually recognize objects in the world. However, the fundamental visual challenge of the moment-to-moment variations in object appearances that learners must resolve has received little attention in word learning research. Here we provide…

Young children have an overall preference for child-directed speech (CDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and its structural features are thought to facilitate language learning. Many studies have supported these findings, but less is known about processing of CDS at short, sub-second timescales. How do the moment-to-moment dynamics of CDS…

Poor maternal mental health negatively impacts cognitive development from infancy to childhood, affecting both behavior and brain architecture. In a non-western context (Thimphu, Bhutan), we demonstrate that culturally-moderated factors such as family, community social support, and enrichment may buffer and scaffold the development of infant…

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal…

The overall pattern of vocabulary development is relatively similar across children learning different languages. However, there are considerable differences in the words known to individual children. Historically, this variability has been explained in terms of differences in the input. Here, we examine the alternate possibility that children's…