CAREER: The trajectory of early learning and its roots in early social interactions

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Research over the past two decades has revealed remarkable perceptual and cognitive abilities in early infancy. There has been much debate over the origins of this early knowledge, whether infants come equipped with fundamental concepts or whether these are acquired. Recent research using miniature artificial languages has contributed importantly to this debate by revealing powerful learning abilities in infancy. Such findings have implications for our understanding of how infant cognition arises and how it changes over the course of development. However, we still know little about the trajectory of early learning, making it difficult to determine the relative contributions of innate and acquired factors. What are the learning abilities available to infants of different ages? Do infants begin with specific default sensitivities or are they sensitive to a broad array of information from the very beginning? Given several sources of information in a learning situation, how do infants know where to direct their attention? To what extent are they able to separate relevant from irrelevant information and how does this ability develop? How specific are learning abilities to particular learning domains? Additionally, learning research has been far removed from the everyday experiences central to an infant's existence, such as those involved in early social interactions. Yet, the quality of these interactions is profoundly linked to later cognition, raising important questions concerning the relationship between infants' earliest social experiences and later learning. This career development plan will investigate the scope and limits of early learning by exposing infants of different ages to miniature artificial languages of varying degrees of complexity. The PI will conduct initial studies with cross-sectional populations and several later studies longitudinally. The research will investigate learning in both auditory and visual domains to examine the domain-specificity of early learning. The PI will also investigate the relationship between contingent responsiveness in early social interactions and learning in the cognitive domain to determine the impact of early learning experiences on later ones. An additional critical component of this plan involves undergraduate training. Students from underrepresented groups will be mentored throughout their undergraduate training with the objective of preparing them for careers in science and teaching. The goal of this research is to obtain a fine-grained description of early learning and its relationship to early social experiences. A better understanding of the impact of early social interactions on learning in the cognitive domain will have merit for parents and scholars alike, especially given the growing recognition of the importance of the first three years of life to later development. The training component will promote teaching, training, and learning in a highly interactive research setting. It will be instrumental in increasing diversity among teachers and scholars in our universities, thus serving the needs of our changing population