Faculty Bibliography

INTRODUCTION: New interest has arisen in organizing, preserving, and sharing the raw materials-the data and metadata-that undergird the published products of research. Library and information scientists have valuable expertise to bring to bear in the effort to create larger, more diverse, and more widely used data repositories. However, for libraries to be maximally successful in providing the research data management and preservation services required of a successful data repository, librarians must work closely with researchers and learn about their data management workflows. DESCRIPTION OF SERVICES: Databrary is a data repository that is closely linked to the needs of a specific scholarly community-researchers who use video as a main source of data to study child development and learning. The project's success to date is a result of its focus on community outreach and providing services for scholarly communication, engaging institutional partners, offering services for data curation with the guidance of closely involved information professionals, and the creation of a strong technical infrastructure. NEXT STEPS: Databrary plans to improve its curation tools that allow researchers to deposit their own data, enhance the user-facing feature set, increase integration with library systems, and implement strategies for long-term sustainability.

Motor development-traditionally described in terms of age-related stages-is typically studied in the laboratory with participants of Western European descent. Cross-cultural studies typically focus on group differences in age-related stages relative to Western norms. We adopted a less traditional approach: We observed 5-month-olds and their mothers from six cultural groups around the world during one hour at home while they engaged in natural daily activities. We examined group differences in infants' sitting proficiency, everyday opportunities to practice sitting, the surfaces on which sitting took place, and mothers' proximity to sitting infants. Infants had opportunities to practice sitting in varied contexts-including ground, infant chairs, and raised surfaces. Proficiency varied considerably within and between cultural groups: 64% of the sample sat only with support from mother or furniture and 36% sat independently. Some infants sat unsupported for 20+ minutes, in some cases so securely that mothers moved beyond arms' reach of their infants even while infants sat on raised surfaces. Our observations of infant sitting across cultures provide new insights into the striking range of ability, varied opportunities for practice, and contextual factors that influence the proficiency of infant motor skills.

Traditionally, crawling and sitting are considered distinct motor behaviors with different postures and functions. Ten- to 12-month-old infants were observed in the laboratory or in their homes while being coaxed to crawl continuously over long, straight walkways (Study 1; N = 20) and during spontaneous crawling during free play (Study 2; N = 20). In every context, infants stopped crawling to sit 3-6 times per minute. Transitions from crawling to sitting frequently turned infants' bodies away from the direction of heading; subsequent transitions back to crawling were offset by as much as 180 degrees from the original direction of heading. Apparently, body reorientations result from the biomechanics of transitioning between crawling and sitting. Findings indicate that sustained, linear crawling is likely an epiphenomenon of how gait is studied in standard paradigms. Postural transitions between crawling and sitting are ubiquitous and can represent a functional unit of action. These transitions and the accompanying body reorientations likely have cascading effects for infants' exploration, visual perception, and spatial cognition.

Global visual processing is important for segmenting scenes, extracting form from background, and recognizing objects. Local processing involves attention to the local elements, contrast, and boundaries of an image at the expense of extracting a global percept. Previous work is inconclusive regarding the relative development of local and global processing. Some studies suggest that global perception is already present by 8 months of age, whereas others suggest that the ability arises during childhood and continues to develop during adolescence. We used a novel method to assess the development of global processing in 3- to 10-year-old children and an adult comparison group. We used Kanizsa illusory contours as an assay of global perception and measured responses on a touch-sensitive screen while monitoring eye position with a head-mounted eye tracker. Participants were tested using a similarity match-to-sample paradigm. Using converging measures, we found a clear developmental progression with age such that the youngest children performed near chance on the illusory contour discrimination, whereas 7- and 8-year-olds performed nearly perfectly, as did adults. There was clear evidence of a gradual shift from a local processing strategy to a global one; young children looked predominantly at and touched the "pacman" inducers of the illusory form, whereas older children and adults looked predominantly at and touched the middle of the form. These data show a prolonged developmental trajectory in appreciation of global form, with a transition from local to global visual processing between 4 and 7 years of age.

Visual exploration in infants and adults has been studied using two very different paradigms: free viewing of flat screen displays in desk-mounted eye-tracking studies and real-world visual guidance of action in head-mounted eye-tracking studies. To test whether classic findings from screen-based studies generalize to real-world visual exploration and to compare natural visual exploration in infants and adults, we tested observers in a new paradigm that combines critical aspects of both previous techniques: free viewing during real-world visual exploration. Mothers and their 9-month-old infants wore head-mounted eye trackers while mothers carried their infants in a forward-facing infant carrier through a series of indoor hallways. Demands for visual guidance of action were minimal in mothers and absent for infants, so both engaged in free viewing while moving through the environment. Similar to screen-based studies, during free viewing in the real world low-level saliency was related to gaze direction. In contrast to screen-based studies, only infants - not adults - were biased to look at people, participants of both ages did not show a classic center bias, and mothers and infants did not display high levels of inter-observer consistency. Results indicate that several aspects of visual exploration of a flat screen display do not generalize to visual exploration in the real world.

We examined mothers' verbal responses to their crawling or walking infants' object sharing (i.e. bids). Fifty mothers and their 13-month-olds were observed for 1 hour at home. Infants bid from a stationary position or they bid after carrying the object to their mothers. Mothers responded with affirmations (e.g. 'thank you'), descriptions ('red box'), or action directives ('open it'). Infants' locomotor status and the form of their bids predicted how mothers responded. Mothers of walkers responded with action directives more often than mothers of crawlers. Notably, differences in the responses of mothers of walkers versus those of crawlers were explained by differences in bid form between the two groups of infants. Walkers were more likely to engage in moving bids than crawlers, who typically shared objects from stationary positions. When crawlers displayed moving bids, their mothers offered action directives just as often as did mothers of walkers. Findings illustrate developmental cascades, wherein Infants' locomotor status affects how infants share objects with mothers, which in turn shapes mothers' verbal responses.

Recent research has revealed the important role of multimodal object exploration in infants' cognitive and social development. Yet, the real time effects of postural position on infants' object exploration have been largely ignored. In the current study, 5- to 7-month-old infants (N = 29) handled objects while placed in supported sitting, supine, and prone postures, and their spontaneous exploratory behaviors were observed. Infants produced more manual, oral, and visual exploration in sitting compared to lying supine and prone. Moreover, while sitting, infants more often coupled manual exploration with mouthing and visual examination. Infants' opportunities for learning from object exploration are embedded within a real time postural context that constrains the quantity and quality of exploratory behavior.

We propose a new way to describe affordances for action. Previous characterizations of affordances treat action possibilities as binary categories-either possible or impossible-separated by a critical point. Here, we show that affordances are probabilistic functions, thus accounting for variability in motor performance. By measuring an affordance function, researchers can describe the likelihood of success for every unit of the environment. We demonstrate how to fit an affordance function to performance data using established psychophysical procedures and illustrate how the threshold and variability parameters describe different possibilities for action. Finally, we discuss the implications of probabilistic affordances for development, perception, and decision-making.