Faculty Bibliography

Video data are uniquely suited for research reuse and for documenting research methods and findings. However, curation of video data is a serious hurdle for researchers in the social and behavioral sciences, where behavioral video data are obtained session by session and data sharing is not the norm. To eliminate the onerous burden of post hoc curation at the time of publication (or later), we describe best practices in active data curation-where data are curated and uploaded immediately after each data collection to allow instantaneous sharing with one button press at any time. Indeed, we recommend that researchers adopt "hyperactive" data curation where they openly share every step of their research process. The necessary infrastructure and tools are provided by Databrary-a secure, web-based data library designed for active curation and sharing of personally identifiable video data and associated metadata. We provide a case study of hyperactive curation of video data from the Play and Learning Across a Year (PLAY) project, where dozens of researchers developed a common protocol to collect, annotate, and actively curate video data of infants and mothers during natural activity in their homes at research sites across North America. PLAY relies on scalable standardized workflows to facilitate collaborative research, assure data quality, and prepare the corpus for sharing and reuse throughout the entire research process.

Flexibility and generativity are fundamental aspects of functional behavior that begin in infancy and improve with experience. How do infants learn to tailor their real-time solutions to variations in local conditions? On a nativist view, the developmental process begins with innate prescribed solutions, and experience elaborates on those solutions to suit variations in the body and the environment. On an emergentist view, infants begin by generating a variety of strategies indiscriminately, and experience teaches them to select solutions tailored to the current relations between their body and the environment. To disentangle these accounts, we observed coordination patterns in 11-month-old pre-walking infants with a range of cruising (moving sideways in an upright posture while holding onto a support) and crawling experience as they cruised over variable distances between two handrails they held for support. We identified infants' coordination patterns using a novel combination of computer-vision, machine-learning, and time-series analyses. As predicted by the emergentist view, the least experienced infants generated multiple coordination patterns inconsistently regardless of body size and handrail distance, whereas the most experienced infants tailored their coordination patterns to body-environment relations and switched solutions only when necessary. Moreover, the beneficial effects of experience were specific to cruising and not crawling, although both skills involve anti-phase coordination among the four limbs. Thus, findings support an emergentist view and suggest that everyday experience with the target skill may promote "learning to learn," where infants learn to assemble the appropriate solution for new problems on the fly.

What is the role of errors in infants' acquisition of basic skills such as walking, skills that require immense amounts of practice to become flexible and generative? Do infants change their behaviors based on negative feedback from errors, as suggested by "reinforcement learning" in artificial intelligence, or do errors go largely unmarked so that learning relies on positive feedback? We used falling as a model system to examine the impact of errors in infant development. We examined fall severity based on parent reports of prior falls and videos of 563 falls incurred by 138 13- to 19-month-old infants during free play in a laboratory playroom. Parent reports of notable falls were limited to 33% of infants and medical attention was limited to 2% of infants. Video-recorded falls were typically low-impact events. After falling during free play in the laboratory, infants rarely fussed (4% of falls), caregivers rarely showed concern (8% of falls), and infants were back at play within seconds. Impact forces were mitigated by infants' effective reactive behaviors, quick arrest of the fall before torso or head impact, and small body size. Moreover, falling did not alter infants' subsequent behavior. Infants were not deterred from locomotion or from interacting with the objects and elevations implicated in their falls. We propose that a system which discounts the impact of errors in early stages of development encourages infants to practice basic skills such as walking to the point of mastery.

Motor skills are important for development. Everything infants do involves motor skills - postural, locomotor, and manual actions; exploratory actions; social interactions; and actions with artifacts. Put another way, all behavior is motor behavior, and thus motor skill acquisition is synonymous with behavioral development. Age norms for basic motor skills provide useful diagnostics for "typical" development, but cultural differences in child-rearing practices influence skill onset ages. Whenever they emerge, motor skills lay the foundation for development by opening up new opportunities for learning. Postural control brings new parts of the environment into view and into reach; locomotion makes the larger world accessible; manual skills promote new forms of interactions with objects; and motor skills involving every part of the body enhance opportunities for social interaction. Thus, motor skills can instigate a cascade of developments in domains far afield from motor behavior - perception and cognition, language and communication, emotional expression and regulation, physical growth and health, and so on. Finally, motor skill acquisition makes behavior increasingly functional and flexible. Infants learn to tailor behavior to variations in their body and environment and to discover or construct new means to achieve their goals.

We propose that developmental cognitive science should invest in an online CRADLE, a Collaboration for Reproducible and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments that crowdsources data from families participating on the internet. Here, we discuss how the field can work together to further expand and unify current prototypes for the benefit of researchers, science, and society.

In this commentary on Osiurak and Reynaud's target article, we argue that action is largely missing in their account of the ascendance of human technological culture. We propose that an action-based developmental account can help to bridge the cognitive-sociocultural divide in explanations of the discovery, production, and cultural transmission of human tool use.

Behavior is essential for understanding infant learning and development. Although behavior is transient and ephemeral, we have the technology to make it tangible and enduring. Video uniquely captures and preserves the details of behavior and the surrounding context. By sharing videos for documentation and data reuse, we can exploit the tremendous opportuni-ties provided by infancy research and overcome the important challenges in studying behavior. The Datavyu video coding software and Databrary digital video library provide tools and infrastructure for mining and sharing the richness of video. This article is based on my Presidential Address to the International Congress on Infant Studies in New Orleans, May 22, 2016 (Video 1 at https://www.databrary.org/volume/955/slot/39352/-?asset=190106. Given that the article de-scribes the power of video for understanding behavior, I use video clips rather than static images to illustrate most of my points, and the videos are shared on the Databrary library.

Where do infants go? A longstanding assumption is that infants primarily crawl or walk to reach destinations viewed while stationary. However, many bouts of spontaneous locomotion do not end at new people, places, or things. Study 1 showed that half of 10- and 13-month-old crawlers' (N = 29) bouts end at destinations-more than previously found with walkers. Study 2 confirmed that, although infants do not commonly go to destinations, 12-month-old crawlers go to proportionally more destinations than age-matched walkers (N = 16). Head-mounted eye tracking revealed that crawlers and walkers mostly take steps in place while fixating something within reach. When infants do go to a destination, they take straight, short paths to a target fixated while stationary.

The ecological approach is a framework for studying the behavior of animals in their environments. My version of an ecological approach focuses on learning in the context of development. I argue that the most important thing animals learn is behavioral flexibility. They must acquire the ability to flexibly guide their behavior from moment to moment in the midst of developmental changes in their bodies, brains, skills, and environments. They must select, modify, and create behaviors appropriate to the current situation. In essence, animals must learn how to learn. I describe the central concepts and empirical strategies for studying learning in development and use examples of infants coping with novel tasks to give a flavor of what researchers know and still must discover about the functions and processes of learning (to learn) in (not and) development.