| 1. |
- Gredebäck, Gustaf, et al.
(author)
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Social cognition in refugee children : An experimental cross-sectional study of emotional processing with Syrian families in Turkish communities
- 2021
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In: Royal Society Open Science. - London : Royal Society. - 2054-5703. ; 8:8
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- More than 5.6 million people have fled Syria since 2011, about half of them children. These children grow up with parents that often suffer from war-related mental health problems. In this study, we assess emotional processing abilities of 6–18 year- old children growing up in families that have fled from Syria and reside in Turkish communities (100 families, 394 individuals). We demonstrate that mothers’, but not fathers’, post-traumatic stress (PTS) impacts children’s emotional processing abilities. A 4% reduction of mothers’ PTS was equivalent to 1 year of development in children, even when controlling for parents’ traumatic experiences. Making a small investment in increased mental health of refugee mothers might have a positive impact on the lives of their children.
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| 2. |
- Gredebäck, Gustaf, et al.
(author)
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Poor maternal mental health is associated with a low degree of proactive control in refugee children
- 2023
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In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. - : Sage Publications. - 1747-0218 .- 1747-0226.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This study assesses the development of proactive control strategies in 100 Syrian refugee families (394 individuals) with 6- to 18-year-old children currently living in Turkish communities. The results demonstrate that children’s age and their mothers’ post-traumatic stress symptoms were associated with the degree of proactive control in their children, with worse mental health being associated with a larger reliance on reactive control and lesser reliance on proactive, future-oriented, control (measured via d′ in the AX-CPT task). None of the following factors contributed to children’s performance: fathers’ experience with post-traumatic stress, parents’ exposure to potentially traumatic warrelated events, perceived discrimination, a decline in socio-economic status, religious beliefs, parents’ proactive control strategies, or the education or gender of the children themselves. The association between mothers’ mental health and proactive control strategies in children was large (in terms of effect size), suggesting that supporting mothers’ mental health might have clear effects on the development of their children.
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| 3. |
- Kayhan, Ezgi, et al.
(author)
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Infants distinguish between two events based on their relative likelihood
- 2018
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In: Child Development. - : Wiley. - 0009-3920 .- 1467-8624. ; 89:6, s. e507-e519
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Likelihood estimations are crucial for dealing with the uncertainty of life. Here, infants' sensitivity to the difference in likelihood between two events was investigated. Infants aged 6, 12, and 18 months (N = 75) were shown animated movies of a machine simultaneously drawing likely and unlikely samples from a box filled with different colored balls. In different trials, the difference in likelihood between the two samples was manipulated. The infants' looking patterns varied as a function of the magnitude of the difference in likelihood and were modulated by the number of items in the samples. Looking patterns showed qualitative similarities across age groups. This study demonstrates that infants' looking responses are sensitive to the magnitude of the difference in likelihood between two events.
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| 4. |
- Elsner, Claudia, et al.
(author)
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Infants' online perception of give-and-take interactions
- 2014
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In: Journal of experimental child psychology (Print). - Elsevier : Elsevier BV. - 0022-0965 .- 1096-0457. ; 126, s. 280-294
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This research investigated infants’ online perception of give-me gestures during observation of a social interaction. In the first experiment, goal-directed eye movements of 12-month-olds were recorded as they observed a give-and-take interaction in which an object is passed from one individual to another. Infants’ gaze shifts from the passing hand to the receiving hand were significantly faster when the receiving hand formed a give-me gesture relative to when it was presented as an inverted hand shape. Experiment 2 revealed that infants’ goal-directed gaze shifts were not based on different affordances of the two receiving hands. Two additional control experiments further demonstrated that differences in infants’ online gaze behavior were not mediated by an attentional preference for the give-me gesture. Together, our findings provide evidence that properties of social action goals influence infants’ online gaze during action observation. The current studies demonstrate that infants have expectations about well-formed object transfer actions between social agents. We suggest that 12-month-olds are sensitive to social goals within the context of give-and-take interactions while observing from a third-party perspective.
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| 5. |
- Galazka, Martyna A.
(author)
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Social causality in motion : Visual bias and categorization of social interactions during the observation of chasing in infancy
- 2017
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Since the seminal work of Fritz Heider and Marienne Simmel (1944) the study of animacy perception, or the perception and attribution of life from the motion of simple geometrical shapes has intrigued researchers. The intrigue for psychologists and vision scientists then and today centered on the stark disconnect between the simplicity of the visual input and the universal richness of the resulting percept.Infant research in this domain has become critical in examining the ontological processes behind the formation of animated percepts. To date, little is known about how infants process these kinds of stimuli. While numerous habituation studies have shown sensitivity to animate motion in general, none to date has examined whether infants actually perceive animate displays as social interactions.The overarching goal of the present thesis is to answer this question and further augment knowledge about the mechanisms behind the formation of animated percepts in infancy. I, along with my collaborators, do so in three ways, in three separate studies. First, we examined visual attention during online observation of randomly moving geometrical shapes in adults and infants (Study I, using eye tracking). Second, we examine distribution of visual attention in infancy during online observation of non-contact causal interactions, focusing on the most ubiquitous, fitness relevant of interactions – chasing (Study II, using eye tracking). Third, we answer the question whether infants perceive social content in chasing displays by measuring the neural correlates in response to chasing (Study III, using EEG).The collective contribution of the present work is also three fold. First, it demonstrates that starting at the end of the first year of life, human visual system is sensitive to cues that efficiently predict an interaction. Second, at 5-months infants begins allocating attention differently across agents within interactions. Finally, attention to specific objects is not due to low-level saliency but the social nature of the interaction. Subsequently, I present the case that perception of social agents is fast, direct, and reflects the workings of a specialized learning mechanisms whose function is the detection of heat-seeking animates in motion.
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| 6. |
- Thorup, Emilia
(author)
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Joint Attention in Development : Insights from Children with Autism and Infant Siblings
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Compared to other children, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are known to engage less in joint attention - the sharing of attention between two individuals toward a common object or event. Joint attention behaviors - for example gaze following, alternating gaze, and pointing - play an important role in early development, as they provide a foundation for learning and social interaction. Study I and Study II focused on infant siblings of children with ASD. These infants, often termed high risk (HR) infants, have an increased probability of receiving a later ASD diagnosis. Studying them therefore allows for the detection of early signs of ASD. Live eye tracking was used to investigate different joint attention behaviors at 10 months of age. Study I showed that omitting the head movement that usually accompany experimenters’ eye gaze shifts in similar designs reduced gaze following performance in the HR group, but not in a group of infants at low risk (LR) for ASD. HR infants may thus be less sensitive to eye information, or may need more salient cues in order to follow gaze optimally. Study II focused on the infants’ tendency to initiate joint attention by alternating their gaze between a person and an event. LR infants engaged more in alternating gaze than HR infants, and less alternating gaze in infancy was associated with more ASD symptoms at 18 months. This relation remained when controlling for visual disengagement and general social interest in infancy. Study III explored the role of joint attention later in development, by investigating the microstructure of the looking behaviors of autistic and typically developing children (~6 years old). The results indicated that seeing somebody look at an object influenced the processing of that object less in autistic children than in the typically developing controls. Both groups followed gaze effectively, suggesting that differences in joint attention at this age may be subtle, but detectable with eye tracking technology. Together, the studies contribute to our understanding of the role that joint attention atypicalities play both in the early development of infants at risk for ASD, and later in the development of children with a confirmed diagnosis.
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| 7. |
- van den Berg, Linda
(author)
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Reaching for Excellence? : Does training improve motor abilities and cause cascading effects in the visual attention and social perception domain?
- 2022
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- claimed in the last 20 years. Being able to reach for objects provides infants with an interactive interface with their environment. After reach onset, objects can be explored closer to the face and manipulated. Social perception abilities and visual attention have both been found to relate to motor development. We can observe successful reaching and grasping between the ages of 4 and 6 months of age. Research has proposed that these abilities can be observed sooner if infants take part in a reaching training. The sticky mittens training has been put forward as a training that can help infants reach before they would normally start reaching. Moreover, the training has been suggested to increase social perception and visual attention. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to examine whether this training affects infant abilities in these three domains (motor, social perception, and visual attention) at the age of 3 months and 10 months. In this thesis, three studies are presented. Study I described the sticky mittens field and gave an overview of what we currently know about the training’s effects. Study II examined whether the sticky mittens training affects the emergence of reaching and grasping using the original task from the sticky mittens literature and a new task. Study III examined whether the sticky mittens training affected social perception and visual attention abilities.The main results in Study I were that the sticky mittens effects are inconsistent in the motor domain and visual attention domain. However, the effects seemed robust in the social perception domain. In Study II, the main results were that the training was unable to improve reaching and grasping, as indicated by the lack of reaching and grasping in the original and new tasks. In Study III, it was found that the training did not affect social perception and visual attention. In conclusion, the training did not work in the current sample. However, there is not enough evidence to conclude that the training is either effective or ineffective.
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| 8. |
- Juvrud, Joshua, 1987-
(author)
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The perception of actions and interactions : And the importance of context
- 2019
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The perception of actions and interactions is a dynamic process linked with perceptual processes, the internal and external states of the individual, prior experiences, and the immediate environment. Given these differential contexts, it is very likely there are differences in how infants perceive, interpret, and respond to actions. The present thesis took a developmental and individual differences approach to understanding action perception and processing in infancy. The overarching aim was to understand the development of action perception and how individual differences contribute to the perception and processing of actions. More specifically, individual differences included the capacity to which variations in a child’s context can affect the development of action perception. Study I demonstrated that, like adults, infants could differentiate between physically possible and physically impossible apparent motion paths, as evidenced by pupil dilation. This perception may be related to the context of whether the motion was performed by a human figure or an object. Study II found that in the context of a more complex social interaction, infants differentiated between appropriate and inappropriate responses to a giving action. Furthermore, infants’ individual differences in perceiving a giving action were related to their own giving behaviors later in childhood, suggesting possible specialized mechanisms. Study III took an integrative perspective on context and demonstrated the joint impact of internal and external emotional contexts for infants’ subsequent selective attention during visual search. Infants’ visual attention was affected by previous exposure to a facial emotion and by the mothers’ negative affect. The results of these three studies demonstrate that given differential environmental contexts and experiences, there are differences in how individuals perceive and interpret actions and interactions. Together, this thesis proposes an integrative role of context in perception and demonstrates that perception can never be truly decontextualized.
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| 9. |
- Tu, Hsing-Fen, et al.
(author)
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Maternal childhood trauma and perinatal distress are related to infants’ focused attention from 6 to 18 months
- 2021
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In: Scientific Reports. - : Springer Nature. - 2045-2322. ; 11
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Maternal distress is repeatedly reported to have negative impacts on the cognitive development in children and is linked to neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g. attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder). However, studies examining the associations between maternal distress and the development of attention in infancy are few. This study investigated the longitudinal relationships between maternal distress (depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and exposure to childhood trauma) and the development of focused attention in infancy in 118 mother-infant dyads. We found that maternal exposure to non-interpersonal traumatic events in childhood was associated with the less focused attention of the infants to audio-visual stimuli at 6, 10, and 18 months. In addition, exposure to interpersonal traumatic events in childhood was identified as a moderator of the negative effect of maternal anxiety during the 2nd trimester on the development of focused attention in infants. We discuss the possible mechanisms accounting for these cross-generational effects. Our findings underscore the importance of maternal mental health to the development of focused attention in infancy and address the need for early screening of maternal mental health during pregnancy.
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| 10. |
- Astor Währborg, Kim, 1985-
(author)
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Gaze Following in Infancy : Mechanisms and Developmental Context
- 2024
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Few things are as fundamental to humans as the ability to share attention. It allows us to coordinate our actions with, and assimilate knowledge from, the actions of others with remarkable efficiency and accuracy. This ability emerges in infancy and sets the stage for all subsequent social development. In this thesis, I explore how infants align visual attention with others toward external objects, a skill known as gaze following. The included studies investigate this phenomenon at different levels, ranging from processes within the infant (Study I) to the impact of infants’ immediate emotional context at a micro-scale (Study II) and cultural variation at a macro scale (Study III).Previous work has suggested different mechanistic explanations for emerging gaze following, ranging from perceptual cueing to reinforcement learning, to social motivation. Study I aimed to conduct a critical test comparing the perceptual cueing perspective with the social-first perspective. The results indicate that infants initially use both cues, but rely more on social information towards the end of the first year. The theories of gaze following emergence can be framed in a broader discussion regarding the developmental base (experience-dependent or experience-expectant). It has been suggested that infants’ environment influences the early development of gaze following. However, some theoretical perspectives hold an experience-expectant perspective that infants are predisposed to align visual attention with others, suggesting that gaze following should be relatively robust early in life. In Study II, we found that infants’ gaze following was impacted by attachment quality and maternal Postpartum depression (PPD) at 6 and 10 months, respectively, aligning with an experience-dependent view of development. Study III extends this work to test the universality of Study II and gaze following as a valid measure of attention sharing. We found that across different cultural contexts (Bhutanese and Swedish), infants follow gaze to a similar degree. However, the impact of infants’ social and emotional environment observed in Study II was not found in Bhutan. We discuss the possibility that cultures relying more on interdependent values possess inherent protective factors that mitigate the negative effects of PPD on the infant.
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