Infants' reorienting efficiency depends on parental autistic traits and predicts future socio-communicative behaviors.

Attentional reorienting is dysfunctional not only in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but also in infants who will develop ASD, thus constituting a potential causal factor of future social interaction and communication abilities. Following the research domain criteria framework, we hypothesized that the presence of subclinical autistic traits in parents should lead to atypical infants' attentional reorienting, which in turn should impact on their future socio-communication behavior in toddlerhood. During an attentional cueing task, we measured the saccadic latencies in a large sample (total enrolled n = 89; final sample n = 71) of 8-month-old infants from the general population as a proxy for their stimulus-driven attention. Infants were grouped in a high parental traits (HPT; n = 23) or in a low parental traits (LPT; n = 48) group, according to the degree of autistic traits self-reported by their parents. Infants (n = 33) were then longitudinally followed to test their socio-communicative behaviors at 21 months. Results show a sluggish reorienting system, which was a longitudinal predictor of future socio-communicative skills at 21 months. Our combined transgenerational and longitudinal findings suggest that the early functionality of the stimulus-driven attentional network-redirecting attention from one event to another-could be directly connected to future social and communication development.

The power of coaches' emotions: A case study on how coaches' facial expressions impact performance of young female synchronized ice-skaters.

OBJECTIVES: The present study aimed to investigate the impact of coaches' pleasant and unpleasant facial expressions on affects and team performance of young elite female synchronized ice-skaters. METHODS: Initially, the coach provided a neutral explanation of the exercise, which was followed by the athletes' execution. The ice-skaters then received either pleasant or unpleasant feedback from the coach, completed two questionnaires, and performed the exercise again. The study involved two familiar and two unfamiliar coaches. RESULTS: Coaches' pleasant expressions increased athletes' arousal/hedonic tone and positive affect, while coaches' unpleasant expressions heightened athletes' negative affect. Moreover, participants significantly performed better after receiving an unpleasant facial expression by the coach. Receiving pleasant/unpleasant feedback from a familiar or unfamiliar coach did not have a significant impact on team pre- and post-feedback performance. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that coaches' facial expressions impacted athletes' positive/negative affect, and that, under specific circumstances, receiving unpleasant feedback from the coach can improve team performance.

A unified approach to demographic data collection for research with young children across diverse cultures.

Culture is a key determinant of children's development both in its own right and as a measure of generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants' demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in child development research. A barrier to reporting demographic data in a consistent fashion is that no standardized tool currently exists to collect these data. Variation in cultural expectations, family structures, and life circumstances across communities make the creation of a unifying instrument challenging. Here, we present a framework to standardize demographic reporting for early child development (birth to 3 years of age), focusing on six core sociodemographic construct categories: biological information, gestational status, health status, community of descent, caregiving environment, and socioeconomic status. For each category, we discuss potential constructs and measurement items and provide guidance for their use and adaptation to diverse contexts. These items are stored in an open repository of context-adapted questionnaires that provide a consistent approach to obtaining and reporting demographic information so that these data can be archived and shared in a more standardized format. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Validation of an open source, remote web-based eye-tracking method (WebGazer) for research in early childhood.

Measuring eye movements remotely via the participant's webcam promises to be an attractive methodological addition to in-person eye-tracking in the lab. However, there is a lack of systematic research comparing remote web-based eye-tracking with in-lab eye-tracking in young children. We report a multi-lab study that compared these two measures in an anticipatory looking task with toddlers using WebGazer.js and jsPsych. Results of our remotely tested sample of 18-27-month-old toddlers (N = 125) revealed that web-based eye-tracking successfully captured goal-based action predictions, although the proportion of the goal-directed anticipatory looking was lower compared to the in-lab sample (N = 70). As expected, attrition rate was substantially higher in the web-based (42%) than the in-lab sample (10%). Excluding trials based on visual inspection of the match of time-locked gaze coordinates and the participant's webcam video overlayed on the stimuli was an important preprocessing step to reduce noise in the data. We discuss the use of this remote web-based method in comparison with other current methodological innovations. Our study demonstrates that remote web-based eye-tracking can be a useful tool for testing toddlers, facilitating recruitment of larger and more diverse samples; a caveat to consider is the larger drop-out rate.

Electrophysiological signatures of visual temporal processing deficits in developmental dyslexia.

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that affects reading ability despite normal intelligence and education. In search of core deficits, previous evidence has linked DD with impairments in temporal aspects of perceptual processing, which might underlie phonological deficits as well as inefficient graphemic parsing during reading. However, electrophysiological evidence for atypical temporal processing in DD is still scarce in the visual modality. Here, we investigated the efficiency of both temporal segregation and integration of visual information by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). We confirmed previous evidence of a selective segregation deficit in dyslexia for stimuli presented in rapid succession (<80 ms), despite unaffected integration performance. Importantly, we found a reduced N1 amplitude in DD, a component related to the allocation of attentional resources, which was independent of task demands (i.e., evident in both segregation and integration). In addition, the P3 amplitude, linked to working memory and processing load, was modulated by task demands in controls but not in individuals with DD. These results suggest that atypical attentional sampling in dyslexia might weaken the quality of information stored in visual working memory, leading to behavioral and electrophysiological signatures of atypical temporal segregation. These results are consistent with some existing theories of dyslexia, such as the magnocellular theory and the "Sluggish Attentional Shifting" framework, and represent novel evidence for neural correlates of decreased visual temporal resolution in DD.

Evaluations of pro-environmental behaviors by 7-month-old infants.

Environmental morality is the foundation of a sustainable future, yet its ontogenetic origin remains unknown. In the present study, we asked whether 7-month-olds have a sense of 'environmental morality'. Infants' evaluations of two pro-environmental actions were assessed in both visual and reaching preferential tasks. In Experiment 1, the overt behavior of protecting (i.e., collecting artificial objects spread on a lawn) was compared with the action of harming the environment (i.e., by disregarding the objects). In Experiment 2, the covert behavior of protecting the environment (i.e., maintaining artificial objects inside a container) was compared with the action of harming the environment (i.e., littering the artificial objects on a lawn). The results showed infants' reaching preference for the agent who performed overt pro-environmental actions (Experiment 1), and no preference for the agent who performed covert pro-environmental actions (Experiment 2). These findings reveal a rudimentary ecological sense and suggest that infants require different abilities to evaluate overt impact-oriented and covert intend-oriented pro-environmental behaviors.

Periodic and Aperiodic EEG Features as Potential Markers of Developmental Dyslexia.

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a neurobiological condition affecting the ability to read fluently and/or accurately. Analyzing resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) activity in DD may provide a deeper characterization of the underlying pathophysiology and possible biomarkers. So far, studies investigating resting-state activity in DD provided limited evidence and did not consider the aperiodic component of the power spectrum. In the present study, adults with (n = 26) and without DD (n = 31) underwent a reading skills assessment and resting-state EEG to investigate potential alterations in aperiodic activity, their impact on the periodic counterpart and reading performance. In parieto-occipital channels, DD participants showed a significantly different aperiodic activity as indexed by a flatter and lower power spectrum. These aperiodic measures were significantly related to text reading time, suggesting a link with individual differences in reading difficulties. In the beta band, the DD group showed significantly decreased aperiodic-adjusted power compared to typical readers, which was significantly correlated to word reading accuracy. Overall, here we provide evidence showing alterations of the endogenous aperiodic activity in DD participants consistently with the increased neural noise hypothesis. In addition, we confirm alterations of endogenous beta rhythms, which are discussed in terms of their potential link with magnocellular-dorsal stream deficit.

The Dynamic Interplay of Affective, Cognitive and Contextual Resources on Children's Creative Potential: The Modulatory Role of Trait Emotional Intelligence.

In the present work we explored in two separate studies the modulatory role of trait emotional intelligence (EI) over the effect exerted on children's creative potential by two other key elements defining creativity, namely cognitive resources (here explored through basic executive functions, Study 1) and contextual-environmental factors (that is, teachers' implicit conceptions of the factors influencing children's creativity, Study 2). Confirming previous research, executive functions (particularly interference control and working memory) emerged as main predictors of children's creative performance; however, their positive effect arose especially when associated with a high trait EI level. In the same vein, teachers' implicit conception about children's creative potential and about their efficacy in teaching creativity emerged to exert a facilitatory effect on children' creative potential. This effect occurred particularly when associated with low trait EI levels, affecting differently girls and boys. Trait EI emerged from these studies as an important individual resource to consider in order to understand the potential benefit of other (cognitive and contextual-environmental) resources on children's creative potential. The implications on the role of trait EI as a constitutional element of children's creativity, capable of promoting the expression of their creative potential, are discussed.

Improving the generalizability of infant psychological research: The ManyBabies model.

Yarkoni's analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to diversification, and focused on understanding sources of variation.

Investigating the role of temporal processing in developmental dyslexia: Evidence for a specific deficit in rapid visual segmentation.

The current study investigates the role of temporal processing in the visual domain in participants with developmental dyslexia (DD), the most common neurodevelopmental disorder, which is characterized by severe and specific difficulties in learning to read despite normal intelligence and adequate education. Specifically, our aim was to test whether DD is associated with a general impairment of temporal sensory processing or a specific deficit in temporal integration (which ensures stability of object identity and location) or segregation (which ensures sensitivity to changes in visual input). Participants with DD performed a task that measured both temporal integration and segregation using an identical sequence of two displays separated by a varying interstimulus interval (ISI) under two different task instructions. Results showed that participants with DD performed worse in the segregation task, with a shallower slope of the psychometric curve of percentage correct as a function of the ISI between the two target displays. Moreover, we found also a relationship between temporal segregation performance and text, words, and pseudowords reading speeds at the individual level. In contrast, no significant association between reading (dis)ability and temporal integration emerged. The current findings provide evidence for a difference in the fine temporal resolution of visual processing in DD and, considering the growing evidence about a link between visual temporal segregation and neural oscillations at specific frequencies, they support the idea that DD is characterized by an altered oscillatory sampling within the visual system.

Infants' use of motion cues in object individuation processes.

We investigated 10-month-old infants' and adults' numerical expectations in scenarios where information on self-motion and static object features may give rise to numerically incongruent representations. A red circle or a blue box with yellow stripes appeared on the left side of a screen, moved autonomously sideways and then moved back behind the screen. Next, on the opposite side, an identical object was first brought in view by a hand and then pushed back behind the screen (Experiments 1 and 2). The screen was finally removed, revealing either one or two objects. Infants looked longer at one-object test events, suggesting that they expected to find two objects. Adults were also shown these animations and were asked for their numerical expectations. Contrary to infants, they expected one single object (Experiment 3). Whereas preverbal infants' numerical expectations appeared to be dominated by information on object autonomous and induced motion, adults' expectations were mainly guided by information about object shape, size, and color. These findings were discussed in relation to current models on the development of object individuation processes.

On the domain specificity of the mechanisms underpinning spontaneous anticipatory looks in false-belief tasks.

Many studies proposed that infants' and adults' looking behavior suggest a spontaneous and implicit ability to reason about others' beliefs. It has been argued, however, that these successes are false positives due to domain-general processes, such as retroactive interference. In this study, we investigated the domain specificity of mechanisms underpinning participants' looking behavior by manipulating the dynamic cues in the event stimuli. Infants aged 15 and 20 months and adults saw animation events in which either a self-moving triangle, or a hand holding an identical inert triangle, chased an animated disk. Most 20-month-olds and adults showed belief congruent anticipatory looks in the agent-triangle condition, whereas they showed no bias in the inert triangle control condition. These results are not consistent with submentalizing accounts based on domain-general low-level processes and provide further support for domain-specific explanations positing an early-emerging mentalistic reasoning.

Many moral buttons or just one? Evidence from emotional facial expressions.

We investigated whether moral violations involving harm selectively elicit anger, whereas purity violations selectively elicit disgust, as predicted by the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). We analysed participants' spontaneous facial expressions as they listened to scenarios depicting moral violations of harm and purity. As predicted by MFT, anger reactions were elicited more frequently by harmful than by impure actions. However, violations of purity elicited more smiling reactions and expressions of anger than of disgust. This effect was found both in a classic set of scenarios and in a new set in which the different kinds of violations were matched on weirdness. Overall, these findings are at odds with predictions derived from MFT and provide support for "monist" accounts that posit harm at the basis of all moral violations. However, we found that smiles were differentially linked to purity violations, which leaves open the possibility of distinct moral modules.

Toddlers map the word 'good' to helping agents, but not to fair distributors.

Infants begin to understand some of the meanings of the adjective good at around thirteen months, but it is not clear when they start to map it to concepts in the moral domain. We investigated infants' and toddlers' knowledge of good in the domains of help and fairness. Participants at 20 and 30 months were shown computer animations involving helpful and hindering agents, or agents who performed fair or unfair distributions, and were asked to "pick the good one". Toddlers at 30 months took good as referring to helping, but not to the fair agents. However, when asked "to pick one", they choose the fair distributor. These findings suggest that by 30 months toddlers have started to map good to some socio-moral features, such as a helping disposition, but not to fairness in distributive actions.

Cooking with alcohol: a matched case-control study in Italy and germany assessing the risk of alcoholism due to an early exposure to alcohol in childhood

The study aims at understanding the role of early exposure to ethanol during childhood, in particular in the form of alcohol used in food preparation. A matched case control study was conducted in Italy and Germany. 300 cases were selected from the lists of the Alcoholics Anonymous Associations and 300 controls were matched from the general population. A CATI system was used for collecting information on drinking habits, family risk factors, age at first ethanol consumption, binge drinking episodes and alcohol ingestion as a food ingredient during childhood. Association of variables with the status of case were analysed using a multivariable conditional logistic regression. In the multivariable model four variables were selected: education, father drinking status, age at first ethanol consumption and binge drinking during adolescence. Consumption of food containing alcohol in common recipes was not associated with an increased risk of alcoholism in older ages. Drinkers having their first contact directly with alcoholic beverage before age 13 were more likely to suffer from alcohol dependence at some time during their life. On the contrary, using alcohol in food preparation during childhood does not appear to be related with subsequent risk for alcohol abuse(AU)

El estudio tiene como objetivo comprender el papel de la exposición temprana al etanol durante la infancia, en particular, la forma en la que se utiliza el alcohol en la preparación de alimentos. Este estudio de emparejamiento de casos y controles se llevó a cabo en Italia y Alemania. Se seleccionaron 300 casos de las listas de las Asociaciones de Alcohólicos Anónimos y se los emparejó con 300 controles obtenidos de la población general. Se utilizó el sistema CATI para la recolección de información sobre hábitos de consumo, factores de riesgo de la familia, edad del primer consumo de etanol, episodios de consumo excesivo de alcohol, e ingesta de alcohol como ingrediente alimentario durante la infancia. Se analizó la asociación de las variables con la situación de cada caso mediante una regresión logística condicional multivariable. En el modelo multivariable se seleccionaron cuatro factores: educación, relación del padre con el alcohol, edad del primer consumo de etanol y episodios de consumo excesivo de alcohol durante la adolescencia. El consumo de alimentos que contienen alcohol en las recetas comunes no se asoció con un mayor riesgo de alcoholismo en edades más avanzadas. Aquellos bebedores que han tenido su primer contacto directo con bebidas alcohólicas antes de los 13 años eran más propensos a sufrir de dependencia al alcohol en algún momento de su vida. Por el contrario, el uso de alcohol en la preparación de alimentos durante la infancia no parece estar relacionado con un riesgo posterior de abuso en el consumo de alcohol(AU)

Toddlers Selectively Help Fair Agents.

Previous research showed that infants and toddlers are inclined to help prosocial agents and assign a positive valence to fair distributions. Also, they expect that positive and negative actions directed toward distributors will conform to reciprocity principles. This study investigates whether toddlers are selective in helping others, as a function of others' previous distributive actions. Toddlers were presented with real-life events in which two actresses distributed resources either equally or unequally between two puppets. Then, they played together with a ball that accidentally fell to the ground and asked participants to help them to retrieve it. Participants preferred to help the actress who performed equal distributions. This finding suggests that by the second year children's prosocial actions are modulated by their emerging sense of fairness. HIGHLIGHTS: Toddlers (mean age = 25 months) are selective in helping distributors. Toddlers prefer helping a fair rather than an unfair distributor. Toddlers' selective helping provides evidence for an early sense of fairness.

The attentional 'zoom-lens' in 8-month-old infants.

The spatial attention mechanisms of orienting and zooming cooperate to properly select visual information from the environment and plan eye movements accordingly. Despite the fact that orienting ability has been extensively studied in infancy, the zooming mechanism--namely, the ability to distribute the attentional resources to a small or large portion of the visual field--has never been tested before. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the attentional zooming abilities of 8-month-old infants. An eye-tracker device was employed to measure the saccadic latencies (SLs) at the onset of a visual target displayed at two eccentricities. The size of the more eccentric target was adjusted in order to counteract the effect of cortical magnification. Before the target display, attentional resources were automatically focused (zoom-in) or spread out (zoom-out) by using a small or large cue, respectively. Two different cue-target intervals were also employed to measure the time course of this attentional mechanism. The results showed that infants' SLs varied as a function of the cue size. Moreover, a clear time course emerged, demonstrating that infants can rapidly adjust the attentional focus size during a pre-saccadic temporal window. These findings could serve as an early marker for neurodevelopmental disorders associated with attentional zooming dysfunction such as autism and dyslexia.

How a face may affect object-based attention: evidence from adults and 8-month-old infants.

Object-based attention operates on perceptual objects, opening the possibility that the costs and benefits humans have to pay to move attention between-objects might be affected by the nature of the stimuli. The current study reported two experiments with adults and 8-month-old infants investigating whether object-based-attention is affected by the type of stimulus (faces vs. non-faces stimuli). Using the well-known cueing task developed by Egly et al. (1994) to study the object-based component of attention, in Experiment 1 adult participants were presented with two upright, inverted or scrambled faces and an eye-tracker measured their saccadic latencies to find a target that could appear on the same object that was just cued or on the other object that was uncued. Data showed that an object-based effect (a smaller cost to shift attention within- compared to between-objects) occurred only with scrambled face, but not with upright or inverted faces. In Experiment 2 the same task was performed with 8-month-old infants, using upright and inverted faces. Data revealed that an object-based effect emerges only for inverted faces but not for upright faces. Overall, these findings suggest that object-based attention is modulated by the type of stimulus and by the experience acquired by the viewer with different objects.