Presenting wicked problems in a science museum: A methodology to study interest from a dynamic perspective.

Science centers and science museums have an important social role in engaging people with science and technology relevant for complex societal problems-so called wicked problems. We used the case of personalized medicine to illustrate a methodology that can be used to inform the development of exhibitions on such wicked problems. The methodology that is presented is grounded in dynamic theories of interest development that define interest as a multidimensional construct involving knowledge, behavior (personal and general) value, self-efficacy, and emotion. The methodology uses a mixed method design that is able to (1) study the predictive effects of background variables on interest, (2) study the interest dimensions predicting individual interest, and (3) identify the most influential interest dimensions. We set up focus groups (N = 16, age = 20-74, low SES) to design a survey study (N = 341, age 19-89 years olds with a broad range of SES) about people's interest in personalized medicine. Results of a network analysis of the survey data show that despite the variety in emotions and knowledge about subtopics, these dimensions do not play a central role in the multidimensional interest construct. In contrast, general value and behavior (related to understanding scientific research) seem to be interesting candidates for eliciting situational interest that could have an effect on the more long term individual interest. These results are specific for the case of personalized medicine. We discuss ways in which results of studies with the presented methodology might be useful for exhibition development.

Attention Biases to Threat in Infants and Parents: Links to Parental and Infant Anxiety Dispositions.

Parent-to-child transmission of information processing biases to threat is a potential causal mechanism in the family aggregation of anxiety symptoms and traits. This study is the first to investigate the link between infants' and parents' attention bias to dynamic threat-relevant (versus happy) emotional expressions. Moreover, the associations between infant attention and anxiety dispositions in infants and parents were explored. Using a cross-sectional design, we tested 211 infants in three age groups: 5-to-7-month-olds (n = 71), 11-to-13-month-olds (n = 73), and 17-to-19-month-olds (n = 67), and 216 parents (153 mothers). Infant and parental dwell times to angry and fearful versus happy facial expressions were measured via eye-tracking. The parents also reported on their anxiety and stress. Ratings of infant temperamental fear and distress were averaged across both parents. Parents and infants tended to show an attention bias for fearful faces with marginally longer dwell times to fearful versus happy faces. Parents dwelled longer on angry versus happy faces, whereas infants showed an avoidant pattern with longer dwell times to happy versus angry expressions. There was a significant positive association between infant and parent attention to emotional expressions. Parental anxiety dispositions were not related to their own or their infant's attention bias. No significant link emerged between infants' temperament and attention bias. We conclude that an association between parental and infant attention may already be evident in the early years of life, whereas a link between anxiety dispositions and attention biases may not hold in community samples.

Post-error slowing: Large scale study in an online learning environment for practising mathematics and language.

The ability to monitor and adjust our performance is crucial for adaptive behaviour, a key component of human cognitive control. One widely studied metric of this behaviour is post-error slowing (PES), the finding that humans tend to slow down their performance after making an error. This study is a first attempt at generalizing the effect of PES to an online adaptive learning environment where children practise mathematics and language skills. This population was of particular interest since the major development of error processing occurs during childhood. Eight million response patterns were collected from 150,000 users aged 5 to 13 years old for 6 months, across 23 different learning activities. PES could be observed in most learning activities and greater PES was associated with greater post-error accuracy. PES also varied as a function of several variables. At the task level, PES was greater when there was less time pressure, when errors were slower, and in learning activities focusing on mathematical rather than language skills. At the individual level, students who chose the most difficult level to practise and had higher skill ability also showed greater PES. Finally, non-linear developmental differences in error processing were found, where the PES magnitude increased from 6 to 9-years-old and decreased from 9 to 13. This study shows that PES underlies adaptive behaviour in an educational context for primary school students.

Pupil responses to dynamic negative facial expressions of emotion in infants and parents.

Observing others' emotions triggers physiological arousal in infants as well as in adults, reflected in dilated pupil sizes. This study is the first to examine parents' and infants' pupil responses to dynamic negative emotional facial expressions. Moreover, the links between pupil responses and negative emotional dispositions were explored among infants and parents. Infants' and one of their parent's pupil responses to negative versus neutral faces were measured via eye tracking in 222 infants (5- to 7-month-olds, n = 77, 11- to 13-month-olds, n = 78, and 17- to 19-month-olds, n = 67) and 229 parents. One parent contributed to the pupil data, whereas both parents were invited to fill in questionnaires on their own and their infant's negative emotional dispositions. Infants did not differentially respond to negative expressions, while parents showed stronger pupil responses to negative versus neutral expressions. There was a positive association between infants' and their parent's mean pupil responses and significant links between mothers' and fathers' stress levels and their infants' pupil responses. We conclude that a direct association between pupil responses in parents and offspring is observable already in infancy in typical development. Stress in parents is related to their infants' pupillary arousal to negative emotions.

WALD-EM: Wald accumulation for locations and durations of eye movements.

Describing, analyzing, and explaining patterns in eye movement behavior is crucial for understanding visual perception. Further, eye movements are increasingly used in informing cognitive process models. In this article, we start by reviewing basic characteristics and desiderata for models of eye movements. Specifically, we argue that there is a need for models combining spatial and temporal aspects of eye-tracking data (i.e., fixation durations and fixation locations), that formal models derived from concrete theoretical assumptions are needed to inform our empirical research, and custom statistical models are useful for detecting specific empirical phenomena that are to be explained by said theory. In this article, we develop a conceptual model of eye movements, or specifically, fixation durations and fixation locations, and from it derive a formal statistical model-meeting our goal of crafting a model useful in both the theoretical and empirical research cycle. We demonstrate the use of the model on an example of infant natural scene viewing, to show that the model is able to explain different features of the eye movement data, and to showcase how to identify that the model needs to be adapted if it does not agree with the data. We conclude with discussion of potential future avenues for formal eye movement models. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Hands-On Exploration of Cubes' Floating and Sinking Benefits Children's Subsequent Buoyancy Predictions.

Children accrue experiences with buoyancy on a daily basis, yet research paints a mixed picture of children's buoyancy knowledge. Whereas children's predictions and explanations of the floating and the sinking of common objects are often based on a single feature (e.g., mass or facts), children's predictions of novel cubes reveal solution strategies based on mass and volume integrations. Correspondingly, category learning theory suggests that categories (e.g., floaters vs. sinkers) are easier to identify when items mainly vary from one another in the relevant defining features. For example, a set of cubes only varies in mass and volume and hence density, thereby being able to highlight the deterministic role of density when placed in water. Here we asked how item variation during hands-on exploration affects children's subsequent predictions and explanations of buoyancy. Kindergarteners and first-, second-, and third-grade children individually explored either a set of 10 systematically varied cubes (i.e., systematic condition; n = 95) or a set of 10 common objects (i.e., non-systematic condition; n = 96) in a water basin. Next, the children predicted the buoyancy of five new cubes and five new common objects one at a time. Subsequently, the children explained their predictions one subset at a time. The children in the systematic condition were more accurate in their predictions of the test cubes than the children in the non-systematic condition. Latent class regression analyses identified three cube prediction solution strategies. The children in the systematic condition were more likely to use a strategy in which buoyancy decisions were made based on an accurate integration of mass and volume, while the children in the non-systematic condition were more likely to use a strategy in which mass was given more predictive load than volume. A third strategy was characterized by guessing. Latent class analyses of the children's explanations revealed different explanation strategies, each appealing to several features, but as hypothesized, no clear condition differences were found. The findings indicate that even 5 min of exploration with systematically varied cubes can already help children use an advanced buoyancy prediction strategy. This provides evidence in favor of using category learning theory to inform early science education design.

Parental Pre-knowledge Enhances Guidance During Inquiry-Based Family Learning in a Museum Context: An Individual Differences Perspective.

Effective interaction and inquiry are an essential source for children's learning about science in an informal context. This study investigated the effect of parental pre-knowledge on parent-child interactions (manipulations, parent talk, and child talk) during an inquiry activity in NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam. The sample included 105 parent-child dyads (mean children's age = 10.0 years). Half of the couples were randomly assigned to the experimental group in which, without the child's knowledge, the parent was shown the task's solution prior to the inquiry activity. Results show that parental pre-knowledge affected the way parents interacted and inquired with their child. Compared to parents without pre-knowledge, parents with pre-knowledge inquired longer, posed more open-ended wh-questions and closed questions, and less often interpreted results. Children of parents with pre-knowledge more often described evidence and interpreted results, more often manipulated alone, and solved the task more accurately. These results indicate that parental pre-knowledge brings about parents' scaffolding behavior. In addition, it was studied how individual differences of parents and children relate to parent-child interaction. Results show that children's self-reported inquiry attitude was related to their conversation during inquiry, such that they asked fewer closed questions and more open-ended questions. Children's gender affected the cooperation between parent and child, parents more often manipulated together with boys than with girls, and girls more often manipulated alone. Fathers with pre-knowledge, but not mothers, let their child manipulate more by oneself than fathers without pre-knowledge. This study shows that more knowledge about an exhibit improves a parent's scaffolding behavior in a science museum. Results are discussed in the context of museum practice.

Pupil mimicry in infants and parents.

Changes in pupil size can reflect social interest or affect, and tend to get mimicked by observers during eye contact. Pupil mimicry has recently been observed in young infants, whereas it is unknown whether the extent and the speed of infants' pupil mimicry response are identical to that of adults. Moreover, the question of whether pupil mimicry in infants is modulated by the race of the observed other remains to be explored. In two studies, pupil mimicry was investigated in infants and their parents. In the first study, 6-, 12- and 18-month-olds (n = 194) and their parents (n = 192) observed eyes with dynamically dilating, constricting, or static pupils. Infants mimicked the pupil sizes of the observed eyes like their parents, but responded slower. Study 2 replicated these findings in a new sample of infants (n = 55, 12-month-olds) and parents (n = 64), and further showed that the pupil mimicry response was not significantly modulated by the race of the observed partner neither in infants nor in parents. We conclude that pupil mimicry is an ancient bonding mechanism that helps to connect people.

Cognitive flexibility training has direct and near transfer effects, but no far transfer effects, in preschoolers.

The current project studied the direct, near transfer, and far transfer effects of cognitive flexibility training in two experiments with 117 3-year-olds. In both Experiments 1 and 2, children performed three Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) tasks in a pre-training/training/post-training design. The training consisted of giving corrective feedback in the training DCCS task. In Experiment 2, in addition, three other executive control tasks were administered during pre-training and post-training. Results showed a direct effect of feedback in the training DCCS task and transfer of this effect to the post-training DCCS task after 1 week with different sorting rules and different stimuli. These findings show that preschoolers learned to switch sorting rules in the context of the DCCS task, independent of the specific sorting rules, and that this effect is not transient. No support was found for transfer to the other executive control tasks. A possible explanation is that the feedback mainly improved rule switching, an ability that is specifically required for performing a cognitive flexibility task but not the other executive control tasks.

Looking (for) patterns: Similarities and differences between infant and adult free scene-viewing patterns.

Systematic tendencies such as the center and horizontal bias are known to have a large influence on how and where we move our eyes during static onscreen free scene viewing. However, it is unknown whether these tendencies are learned viewing strategies or are more default tendencies in the way we move our eyes. To gain insight into the origin of these tendencies we explore the systematic tendencies of infants (3 - 20-month-olds, N = 157) and adults (N = 88) in three different scene viewing data sets. We replicated com-mon findings, such as longer fixation durations and shorter saccade amplitudes in infants compared to adults. The leftward bias was never studied in infants, and our results indi-cate that it is not present, while we did replicate the leftward bias in adults. The general pattern of the results highlights the similarity between infant and adult eye movements. Similar to adults, infants' fixation durations increase with viewing time and the depend-encies between successive fixations and saccades show very similar patterns. A straight-forward conclusion to draw from this set of studies is that infant and adult eye movements are mainly driven by similar underlying basic processes.

Cognitive strategies revealed by clustering eye movement transitions.

In cognitive tasks, solvers can adopt different strategies to process information which may lead to different response behavior. These strategies might elicit different eye movement patterns which can thus provide substantial information about the strategy a person uses. However, these strategies are usually hidden and need to be inferred from the data. After an overview of existing techniques which use eye movement data for the identification of latent cognitive strategies, we present a relatively easy to apply unsuper-vised method to cluster eye movement recordings to detect groups of different solution processes that are applied in solving the task. We test the method's performance using simulations and demonstrate its use on two examples of empirical data. Our analyses are in line with presence of different solving strategies in a Mastermind game, and suggest new insights to strategic patterns in solving Progressive matrices tasks.

Should online math learning environments be tailored to individuals' cognitive profiles?

Online learning environments are well-suited for tailoring the learning experience of children individually and on a large scale. An environment such as Math Garden allows children to practice exercises adapted to their specific mathematical ability; this is thought to maximize their mathematical skills. In the current experiment, we investigated whether learning environments should also consider the differential impact of cognitive load on children's math performance depending on their individual verbal working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC) capacity. A total of 39 children (8-11 years old) performed a multiple-choice computerized arithmetic game. Participants were randomly assigned to two conditions where the visibility of time pressure, a key feature in most gamified learning environments, was manipulated. Results showed that verbal WM was positively associated with arithmetic performance in general but that higher IC predicted better performance only when the time pressure was not visible. This effect was mostly driven by the younger children. Exploratory analyses of eye-tracking data (N = 36) showed that when time pressure was visible, children attended more often to the question (e.g., 6 × 8). In addition, when time pressure was visible, children with lower IC, in particular younger children, attended more often to answer options representing operant confusion (e.g., 9 × 4 = 13) and visited more answer options before responding. These findings suggest that tailoring the visibility of time pressure, based on a child's individual cognitive profile, could improve arithmetic performance and may in turn improve learning in online learning environments.

Pre-verbal infants perceive emotional facial expressions categorically.

Adults perceive emotional expressions categorically, with discrimination being faster and more accurate between expressions from different emotion categories (i.e. blends with two different predominant emotions) than between two stimuli from the same category (i.e. blends with the same predominant emotion). The current study sought to test whether facial expressions of happiness and fear are perceived categorically by pre-verbal infants, using a new stimulus set that was shown to yield categorical perception in adult observers (Experiments 1 and 2). These stimuli were then used with 7-month-old infants (N = 34) using a habituation and visual preference paradigm (Experiment 3). Infants were first habituated to an expression of one emotion, then presented with the same expression paired with a novel expression either from the same emotion category or from a different emotion category. After habituation to fear, infants displayed a novelty preference for pairs of between-category expressions, but not within-category ones, showing categorical perception. However, infants showed no novelty preference when they were habituated to happiness. Our findings provide evidence for categorical perception of emotional expressions in pre-verbal infants, while the asymmetrical effect challenges the notion of a bias towards negative information in this age group.

Real-world scene perception in infants: What factors guide attention allocation?

The foci of visual attention were modeled as a function of perceptual salience, adult fixation locations, and attentional control mechanisms (measured in separate tasks) in infants (N = 45, 3- to 15-month-olds) as they viewed static real-world scenes. After controlling for the center bias, the results showed that low-level perceptual salience predicts where infants look. In addition, high-level factors also played a role: Infants fixated parts of the scenes frequently fixated by adults and this effect was stronger for older than younger infants. In line with this finding, infant fixation durations were longer on regions more frequently fixated by adults, implying longer time taken to process the available information. Fixation durations decreased with age, and this decline interacted with orienting skills such that fixation durations decreased faster with age for infants with high orienting skills, relative to infants with low orienting skills. There was a further interaction between fixation durations and selective attention abilities: Infants with low selective attention skills showed a decrease in fixation durations with age, whereas infants with higher selective attention skills showed a slight increase in fixation durations with age. These findings imply that infants' visual processing of static real-world stimuli develops in accord with attentional control.

Infants' center bias in free viewing of real-world scenes.

This study examines how salience and a center bias drive infants' first fixation while looking at complex scenes. Adults are known to have a strong center bias, their first point of gaze is nearly always in the center of the scene. The center bias is likely to be a strategic bias, as looking towards the center minimizes the distance to other parts of the scene and important objects are often located at the center. In an experimental design varying salience regions of scenes and start positions we examined infants' (N = 48, Age = 5-20-month-olds) first fixation after scene onset. The pre-registered hypothesis that infants also have a center bias while looking at real-world scenes was confirmed. The strength of the center bias is correlated with the saliency distribution such that the bias is weaker when the strongest salience is peripheral rather central. In the absence of clear salient regions there still was a strong center bias. These results suggests there is a competition between stimulus-driven factors and a center bias in steering attention from a young age onwards.

Children's Mental Models of Prenatal Development.

Children's thinking about prenatal development requires reasoning about change that cannot be observed directly. How do children gain knowledge about this topic? Do children have mental models or is their knowledge fragmented? In Experiment 1, results of a forced-choice questionnaire about prenatal development (6- to 13-year-olds; N = 317) indicated that children do have a variety of coherent, grade-related, theories about early shape of the fetus, but not about bodily functions. Coherence of the mental models was enhanced by a preceding generative task. Children's mental models were in agreement with reasoning about natural transformations (Rosengren et al., 1991) and constraints in representational flexibility (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). In Experiment 2, an open-question interview was administered (6- to 12-year-old children; N = 38). The interview resulted in grade-unrelated, incoherent responses. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of naïve biology and to the effects of different methodologies being used in the area of mental models.

Parental negative emotions are related to behavioral and pupillary correlates of infants' attention to facial expressions of emotion.

Previous evidence revealed links between maternal negative emotions and infants' attention to facial expressions of emotion in clinical and community samples. This study investigated the associations between infants' attention to emotional faces and infants' and parents' negative emotions in a community sample. Infants' (N = 57, Mage = 14.26 months) fixations and pupil responses to fearful, sad, angry versus happy and neutral faces were measured with an eye-tracker. Mothers' and fathers' negative emotions (negative affect, depression, and anxiety), and infants' negative temperament were measured with questionnaires. Infants looked longer at fearful than happy or neutral faces, while they showed less pupil dilation to fearful than to happy or neutral faces. Higher levels of maternal negative emotions were related to less pupillary arousal to emotional facial expressions in infants, while paternal negative emotions did not predict infants' pupil responses. Exploratory analyses suggested a significant link between paternal but not maternal negative emotions and infants' fixations that was moderated by infant negative temperament: Higher levels of negative emotions in fathers were related to longer fixations in children with high levels of negative temperament, while it was related to shorter fixations in infants with low levels of negative temperament. The findings provide support for the idea that exposure to mothers' and fathers' negative emotions play a role on the development of infants' attention to facial expressions in typical development.

Investigating the development of causal inference by studying variability in 2- to 5-year-olds' behavior.

This study investigated the development of young children's causal inference by studying variability in behavior. Two possible sources of variability, strategy use and accuracy in strategy execution, were discriminated and related to age. To this end, a relatively wide range of causal inference trials was administered to children of a relatively broad age range: 2- to 5-year-olds. Subsequently, individuals' response patterns over trials were analyzed with a latent variable technique. The results showed that variability in children's behavior could largely be explained by strategy use. Three different strategies were distinguished, and tentative interpretations suggest these could possibly be labeled as "rational", "associative", and "uncertainty avoidance" strategies. The strategies were found to be related to age, and this age-related strategy use better explained the variability in children's behavior than age-related increase in accuracy of executing a single strategy. This study can be considered a first step in introducing a new, fruitful approach for investigating the development of causal inference.

Gazepath: An eye-tracking analysis tool that accounts for individual differences and data quality.

Eye-trackers are a popular tool for studying cognitive, emotional, and attentional processes in different populations (e.g., clinical and typically developing) and participants of all ages, ranging from infants to the elderly. This broad range of processes and populations implies that there are many inter- and intra-individual differences that need to be taken into account when analyzing eye-tracking data. Standard parsing algorithms supplied by the eye-tracker manufacturers are typically optimized for adults and do not account for these individual differences. This paper presents gazepath, an easy-to-use R-package that comes with a graphical user interface (GUI) implemented in Shiny (RStudio Inc 2015). The gazepath R-package combines solutions from the adult and infant literature to provide an eye-tracking parsing method that accounts for individual differences and differences in data quality. We illustrate the usefulness of gazepath with three examples of different data sets. The first example shows how gazepath performs on free-viewing data of infants and adults, compared to standard EyeLink parsing. We show that gazepath controls for spurious correlations between fixation durations and data quality in infant data. The second example shows that gazepath performs well in high-quality reading data of adults. The third and last example shows that gazepath can also be used on noisy infant data collected with a Tobii eye-tracker and low (60 Hz) sampling rate.

Children's representations of another person's spatial perspective: Different strategies for different viewpoints?

The current study investigated development and strategy use of spatial perspective taking (i.e., the ability to represent how an object or array of objects looks from other viewpoints) in children between 8 and 12years of age. We examined this ability with a task requiring children to navigate a route through a model city of wooden blocks from a 90° and 180° rotated perspective. We tested two hypotheses. First, we hypothesized that children's perspective-taking skills increase during this age period and that this process is related to a co-occurring increase in working memory capacity. Results indeed showed clear age effects; accuracy and speed of perspective-taking performance were higher in the older age groups. Positive associations between perspective-taking performance and working memory were observed. Second, we hypothesized that children, like adults, use a mental self-rotation strategy during spatial perspective taking. To confirm this hypothesis, children's performance should be better in the 90° condition than in the 180° condition of the task. Overall, the results did show the reversed pattern; children were less accurate, were slower, and committed more egocentric errors in the 90° condition than in the 180° condition. These findings support an alternative scenario in which children employ different strategies for different rotation angles. We propose that children mentally rotated their egocentric reference frame for 90° rotations; for the 180° rotations, they inverted the left-right and front-back axes without rotating their mental position.