Diversity and Representation in Infant Research: Barriers and bridges towards a globalized science of infant development

Abstract

Why are we still so WEIRD? Barriers and bridges towards a diversified science of early development Leher Singh, Alejandrina Cristia, Lana B. Karasik, and Lisa M. Oakes Author NoteLeher Singh, Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore; Alejandrina Cristia, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d’Etudes Cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, Paris, France; Lana B. Karasik, Department of Psychology, College of Staten Island & Graduate Center, CUNY, Staten Island, New York, U.S.; Lisa M. Oakes, Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis, Davis, CA, U.S.A.C., L.B.K., and L.M.O contributed equally to the manuscript. Acknowledgments: We are very grateful to Sarah J. Rajendra for assistance with data collection and processing. This manuscript was supported by sabbatical funds from the National University of Singapore to LS and by Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-17-EURE-0017), the J. S. McDonnell Foundation Understanding Human Cognition Scholar Award, European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ExELang, Grant agreement No. 101001095) grant awards to AC, National Science Foundation Grant DLS-1349044 and Grant DLS-1528831to LBK.Address for correspondence: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Leher Singh, Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, 9 Arts Link, Singapore 117570. RUNNING HEAD: Diversifying developmental science AbstractIn developmental psychology, no population has been more relevant to the study of the origins of human behavior than infants. The psychological processes of infants often inform fundamental theories of innateness and/or universality of behavior. However, infant samples are typically small with narrow sociodemographic variation. This review examines changing trends in sociodemographic representation in psychological research with infants. Analyses of 1383 studies, published over the past decade, revealed both consistent underreporting of sociodemographic information and clear skew towards White infants from North America/Western Europe. The impact of these findings on our understanding of and interpretation of research on early human development is discussed. A set of principles and practices are presented to advance towards a more global developmental science.

Community-set goals are needed to increase diversity in language acquisition research: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022)

“…In contrast, having over 100 teams working on the same language, as is happening now for English, is almost certainly in the diminishing returns section. We are thrilled by recent efforts by professional organizations for increasing diversity in developmental science (some of which are summarized in Singh et al, 2021), but we think there is still space for additional attention, particularly because many current approaches are focused on individuals (prizes, one-on-one mentorship, summer internships) rather than promoting stronger networks and collaboration.…”

Where to from here? Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline

“…costs nothing but may serve as a good mechanism to avoid proposing overly narrow theoretical concepts or over-interpreting data. Following similar suggestions in adjacent fields (Nielsen et al, 2017;Singh et al, 2022; for an extended discussion see Simons et al, 2017), we encourage journals to consider asking authors to explicitly consider the generalisability of their results given the target language(s) and language-learning environment, regardless of whether the work is on a well-studied or understudied language.…”

“…We are at a point in the history of the cognitive and psychological sciences where we are critically evaluating the degree to which our disciplines represent the entire spectrum of human experience (e.g. Cheon et al, 2020; Clark Barrett, 2020b; Henrich et al, 2010; Medin et al, 2017; Nielsen et al, 2017; Roberts et al, 2020; Singh et al, 2022; Thalmayer et al, 2021). The repeated finding of studies in this space is that we have fallen short of building a representative set of culturally and linguistically diverse research findings.…”

“…WEIRD vs Non-WEIRD, Collectivist vs Individualist) but which are unlikely to adequately capture important details present in a child’s socio-communicative environment (e.g. see Clancy & Davis, 2019; Singh et al, 2022). Linguistic typology gives us a set of dimensions on which languages vary, and it would be a fruitful exercise to take stock of where our knowledge is lacking.…”

Introducing meta-analysis in the evaluation of computational models of infant language development

“…It would be of high importance to do this, as argued byGrahek et al (2021). Unfortunately, there is some evidence that the current sampling of the world's infant population is far from representative(Kidd and Garcia, 2021;Singh et al, 2021), which raises concerns for generalizability, as do low test-retest reliability reports(Cristia et al, 2016).17 Or above average, considering the difficulty in defining upper bound for the human effect sizes (see Section 3.4).…”