presents examples of recently published reports from all four areas of the laboratorys work. Program I: The Child, the Parent, and the Family Across the First 2+ Decades. We studied maternal personality, parenting cognitions, and parenting practices from observations of mother-child interaction is a community sample of mothers and firstborn toddlers. Controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, personality factors qua variables and in patterns qua clusters related differently to diverse parenting cognitions and practices, supporting a theory of the multidimensional, modular, and specific nature of parenting. Maternal personality in the normal range, a theoretically important but empirically neglected factor in everyday parenting, has meaning in studies of parenting, child development, and family process. Program II: Child Development and Parenting in Multicultural Perspective. In a study of cultural determinants of parenting, we used the Parenting Across Cultures Project to evaluate similarities and differences in mean levels and relative agreement between mothers and fathers attributions and attitudes in parenting in 9 countries: China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. Although mothers and fathers did not differ in any attribution, mothers reported more progressive parenting attitudes and modernity of childrearing attitudes than did fathers, and fathers reported more authoritarian attitudes than did mothers. Country differences also emerged in all attributions and attitudes that were examined. Mothers and fathers attributions and their attitudes were moderately correlated, but parenting attitudes were more highly correlated than were attributions. We examined cognitive and socioemotional caregiving in 28 developing countries in more than 127,000 families with under-5 year children. Mothers varied widely in cognitive and socioemotional caregiving and engaged in more socioemotional than cognitive activities. The GDP of countries related to caregiving after controlling for life expectancy and education. We draw policy and intervention recommendations from these data. In another study, we examined home environment conditions (housing quality, material resources, formal and informal learning materials) and their relations with the Human Development Index (HDI) in the same 28 developing countries. The quality of housing and availability of material resources at home were consistently tied to HDI;the availability of formal and informal learning materials less so. Gross domestic product (GDP) tended to show a stronger independent relation with housing quality and material resources than life expectancy and education. Formal learning resources were independently related to the GDP and education indices, and informal learning resources were not independently related to any constituent indices of the overall HDI. Program III: Developmental Neuroscience Eye movements of 4-month-olds were tracked as they viewed animals and vehicles in natural scenes and, for comparison, in matched experimental scenes. Infants showed equivalent looking time preferences for natural and experimental scenes overall, but fixated natural scenes and objects in natural scenes more than experimental scenes and objects in experimental scenes and shifted fixations between objects and contexts more in natural than in experimental scenes. The findings show how infants treat objects and contexts in natural scenes and suggest that they treat more commonly used experimental scenes differently. The eye movements of 4-month-olds and 20-year-olds to object-context relations was investigated. Infants and adults scanned both objects and contexts, but there were differences in how they did so. These findings for location, number, and order of eye movements indicate that object-context relations play a dynamic role in the development and allocation of attention. A study aimed at examining key parameters of the initial conditions in early category learning compared 5-month-olds object categorization between tasks involving previously unseen novel objects, and between measures within tasks. Infants provided no evidence of categorization by either their looking or their examining even though infants in previous research systematically categorized the same objects by examining when they handled them in 3D. Infants in a related experiment participated in a VFNP task with 3D stimulus objects that allowed visual examination of objects 3D instantiation while denying manual contact with the objects. Under these conditions, infants demonstrated categorization by examining but not by looking. Focused examination appears to be a key component of young infants ability to form category representations of novel objects, and 3D instantiation appears to better engage such examining. Program IV: Behavioral Pediatrics. Two studies that combine work in developmental neuroscience and behavioral pediatrics examined perceptual performance in infants of clinically depressed mothers. In a study of object perception, 5-month-old infants of clinically depressed and nondepressed mothers were familiarized to a wholly novel object and afterward tested for their discrimination of the same object presented in the familiar and in a novel perspective. Infants in both groups were adequately familiarized, but infants of clinically depressed mothers failed to discriminate between novel and familiar views of the object, whereas infants of nondepressed mothers successfully discriminated. We discuss the difference in discrimination between infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers in light of infants differential object processing and maternal sociodemographics, mind-mindedness, depression, stress, and interaction styles that may moderate opportunities for infants to learn about their world or influence the development of their perceptuocognitive capacities. In a second study, 5-month-olds of clinically depressed and nondepressed mothers were habituated to either a face with a neutral expression or the same face with a smile. Infants of nondepressed mothers subsequently discriminated between neutral and smiling facial expressions, whereas infants of clinically depressed mothers failed to make the same discrimination. We discuss implications of this divergence in perceptual performance for later cognitive and socioemotional development in depressed dyads. In one of a series of studies of the development of children with Down syndrome, the functional features of maternal and paternal speech was investitgated. Parents and their young children (with Down syndrome and typically developing children) participated. Parents speech directed to children was obtained through observation of naturalistic parent-child dyadic interactions. Verbatim transcripts of maternal and paternal language were categorized in terms of the primary function of each speech unit. Both mothers and fathers of children with Down syndrome used more affect-salient speech compared to parents of typically developing children. Although parents used the same amount of information-salient speech, parents of children with Down syndrome used more direct statements and asked fewer questions than did parents of typically developing children. With respect to parent gender, in both groups mothers used more language than fathers and specifically more descriptions. These findings held controlling for child age and MLU and family SES. The study highlights strengths and weaknesses of parental communication to children with Down syndrome and helps to identify areas of potential improvement through intervention.
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