An examination of measures of young children's interest in natural object categories

Madhavan, Rajalakshmi; Malem, Ben; Ackermann, Lena; Mundry, Roger; Mani, Nivedita

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2024.02.015

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 130 publications

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“…None of these six children chose the category ranked highest (or top 3 highest) according to their looking behaviour during the category interest task. While this sample is too small to allow firm conclusions, this pattern of results is in keeping with previous work suggesting that children’s explicit choice does not appear to be associated with their implicit-looking behaviour [ 107 ]. On the one hand, this may suggest that caregivers may not actually be attuned to what their child is interested in, a suggestion that has implications for the other research questions being addressed here.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…Indeed, only 57.14% of caregivers chose to read a book containing objects from one of the top three categories (chance = 60%), as indicated by their child's looking behaviour (40 out of 70). This discrepancy is mirrored in previous work from our lab showing that caregiver reports and children's behavioural indices of interest are not associated with one another [107]. Indeed, anecdotally, neither did children's explicit choice of the book they wanted to read correspond with their looking behaviour.…”

Section: Overlap Between Children's Interests and Caregiver Perceptio...mentioning

confidence: 53%

“…On the one hand, this may suggest that caregivers may not actually be attuned to what their child is interested in, a suggestion that has implications for the other research questions being addressed here. On the other hand, as is argued in other work [ 107 ], our behavioural index of children’s interest may not capture the same construct of interest as captured by caregivers’ reports [ 63 ]. Recently, examination of children’s looking behaviour measures have been shown to have little reliability [ 108 ], suggesting that looking behaviour may not measure our construct of interest.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

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The quality of caregiver–child interaction is predicted by (caregivers’ perception of) their child’s interests

Madhavan,

Mani

2024

R. Soc. Open Sci.

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This current study examines the extent to which children’s interests and caregivers’ sensitivity to their children’s interests are associated with the quality of caregiver–child interaction, and subsequent learning. Eighty-one caregiver–child dyads (24–30-month old children) completed an online shared book-reading task where caregivers and children read two e-books with pictures and descriptions of objects from different categories—one previously determined to be of low and one of high interest to the child (with one novel word-object mapping introduced in each book). We also obtained separate behavioural indices of children’s interests and children’s later recognition of newly introduced word-object mappings. Our findings highlight that the quality of caregiver–child interaction is predicted by children’s interests and caregivers’ perception of children’s interests, although we find only limited overlap between our behavioural indices of children’s interests and caregiver perception of children’s interests. Neither of these factors predicted later novel word recognition. Thus, while the dynamics between higher quality of caregiver–child interaction, children’s interests and learning remain inconclusive, caregivers and children appear to be more attentive, enthusiastic and engaged in reading about topics that (caregivers believe) interest the child. Furthermore, learning in itself seems to be successful, regardless of factors involved, through the mere task of shared book reading.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Overlap Between Children's Interests and Caregiver Perceptio...mentioning

confidence: 53%