Cole Kaufmann

The concept of attachment security, a biobehavioral system providing infants with confidence in protection from threat and stress, has been expanded to encompass the role of security in promoting children’s future willingness to embrace the caregiver’s socialization rules and values. We report the findings from a longitudinal study of 200 infants (96 girls) who were followed to preschool age. When they were 16 months old, we assessed their security with mothers and fathers in the Strange Situation Paradigm, and when they were 52 months old, we observed their willingness to follow the parents’ requests during toy cleanup with the parent present (committed compliance in toy cleanup with parent), without the parent (internalized compliance in toy cleanup alone), and while engaged in a parent-requested boring task, with distracting attractive toys available (internalized compliance while alone with distractions). All three measures of children’s willingness to follow parental requests were significantly correlated across the two parent-child relationships. Children’s committed compliance with the parent in toy cleanup was significantly correlated with their internalized compliance in toy cleanup alone. As expected, secure children were more willing to follow parental requests, but the findings differed for mother- and father-child dyads. In mother-child dyads, secure children scored significantly higher than insecure children on committed compliance in toy cleanup. In father-child dyads, secure children scored significantly higher than insecure children on internalized compliance while alone with distractions. Kaufmann, C., & Kochanska, G. (2024, November 6). Quality of children's attachment to mothers and fathers at toddler age and willingness to follow parental requests at preschool age [Poster presentation]. University of Iowa Fall Undergraduate Research Festival, Iowa City, IA. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.27437.29921

This study used eye-tracking data from a corpus of existing video recordings from a word learning study that used an intermodal preferential looking procedure. Participants were N = 89 typically developing 15- to 18-month-olds. We analyzed data only from test trials (2 trials per participant), because these trials enabled us to explore two measures of their attention to screen media. Participants were presented with two images on a computer screen and heard a verbal prompt to look at one of them, corresponding to a word. Each trial lasted for 10 seconds. To address our goal, we first developed two measures to characterize patterns of children’s attention. One measure was the number of gaze shifts among the two images. This measure allowed us to evaluate the extent to which children can maintain focus on a specific item on a screen upon receiving verbal instructions. The other measure was the number of gaze shifts away from the screen, which enabled us to evaluate children’s ability to attend to screen without switching their attention to other sources of information. Next, to see what factors may be associated with variation on these two measures, we conducted an exploratory Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to identify axes that accounted for the most variance in our data. The significant factor loadings for PC1 were Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, and Total Vocabulary; for PC2, they were Income and African American ethnic background. Given the set of variables that had significant factor loadings within these components, these two components appeared to capture variation along socioeconomic status (SES) and language competency. We then regressed each of the two measures of participants’ attention on the two principal components. These exploratory regression analyses revealed no effects of either component on the number of gaze shifts among the two images. In contrast, there were significant effects of both SES and language competency, as well as their interaction, on the number of gaze shift away from the screen. Children with higher language competence and from higher-SES backgrounds tended to look away from the screen less. The significant interaction suggests that the effect of language competency on the ability to maintain attention on the screen varied by SES strata. These results are promising and suggest that it might be prudent to take socio-economic background and language competency into account when exploring learning from screen media and attention in clinical populations. However, our study was exploratory and could not determine the direction of causality (if any) that underlies the observed effects. Proper hypothesis testing is necessary before these measures are incorporated into clinical research. Kaufmann, C., Luchkina, E., & Spelke, E. (2024, September 4). Identifying patterns of attention to screen media in typically developing infants [Poster presentation]. International Congress of Infant Studies, Virtual. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.33980.24962

Natural language environments make it difficult for children to grasp relational words due to the widespread use of sameness in language. By introducing infants to contrastive cross-situational labeling, they should indicate an advanced mapping of numerical and relational language. Kaufmann, C., Luchkina, E., & Spelke, E. (2024, August 6). The impact of language on infants' labeling of abstract concepts [Poster presentation]. Harvard University Laboratory for Developmental Studies Department Conference, Cambridge, MA. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.14686.45129