Child & Family Development in the First Decades of Life

儿童和家庭研究科(CFRS)调查在人类生命历程的头20年中，对人类的身体、心理、情感和社会发展做出贡献的性格、经验和环境因素。CFRS研究的总体目标是描述、分析和评估发育中儿童的能力和倾向，包括他们的遗传特征、生理功能、感知和认知能力、情感、社交和互动风格，以及家庭发展对儿童和父母的性质和后果，以及儿童对物理环境的暴露和互动。项目设计是实验性的、纵向的、横截面的，以及文化内和跨文化的。社会人口学比较包括家庭社会经济地位、母亲年龄和就业状况、以及儿童平等和日托经验。研究地点包括阿根廷、澳大利亚、比利时、巴西、喀麦隆、加拿大、英国、法国、以色列、意大利、日本、肯尼亚、秘鲁、韩国以及美国。CFRS广泛关注分析和理解育儿在人类发展中的作用。对养育子女的方法论评估有时会显示出相似的、有时是不同的发现模式，反映出对同一问题采取不同的方法。在一项研究中，母亲和婴儿在基于连续编码的两种文化中的行为频率与基于时间采样的频率进行了比较，并对结果进行了评估。时间抽样和连续编码给出了不同个体和不同文化群体之间典型母婴行为绝对频率的不同估计。然而，时间抽样充分保留了母婴行为在个体之间和文化群体之间的相对排名。如果研究关注的是个体和/或群体在母亲或婴儿行为频率上的相对地位，那么(在特定情况下)时间采样和连续编码产生了类似的结果。美国是一个由适应文化的人组成的国家；那些适应文化的人的原籍国不断变化；文化适应本身的性质是难以捉摸的。目前美国人口普查统计数据表明，美国每五名18岁以下儿童中就有一名，即1400万儿童，要么是移民本身，要么是移民父母的孩子。然而，文化适应作为一种科学现象还没有得到很好的理解；此外，文化适应是儿童健康和人类发展的一种主要变革力量。在CFRS中，我们研究了从日本和南美适应美国文化的家庭。我们评估文化适应以及文化适应在育儿、儿童发展和家庭生活中的作用。对对象、事件和体验的其他方面进行分类的能力是适应性、智能行为的核心。在这种情况下，分类是指在某种程度上将可区别的实体同等对待。如果没有这种能力，每一次与环境的不同遭遇都需要独特的反应，这种需求很快就会超出人类的能力。当将相似实体视为等价时，可以以统一的方式存储关于每个实体的功能相关信息，而不是跨每个实例冗余地存储。此外，一旦实体被分类，访问与给定类别相关联的表示可以提供关于完全新的实体的信息。因此，分类不仅提供了一种经济的方式来组织知识和技能，而且还允许我们将知识和技能扩展到超出我们自己直接经验的限制。由于其深远的适应意义，对范畴化的研究主要关注范畴化的起源和早期发展。现在越来越多的证据表明，人类婴儿出人意料地能够形成和表现各种类别的视觉信息。

The Child and Family Research Section (CFRS) investigates dispositional, experiential, and environmental factors that contribute to physical, mental, emotional, and social development in human beings during the first two decades of life course. The overall goals of research in the CFRS are to describe, analyze, and assess the capabilities and proclivities of developing children, including their genetic characteristics, physiological functioning, perceptual and cognitive abilities, emotional, social, and interactional styles, as well as the nature and consequences for children and parents of family development, and children's exposure to and interactions with their physical surroundings. Project designs are experimental, longitudinal, and cross-sectional as well as intra-cultural and cross-cultural. Sociodemographic comparisons include family socioeconomic status, maternal age and employment status, and child parity and daycare experience. Study sites include Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, England, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Peru, and the Republic of South Korea as well as the United States. The CFRS is broadly concerned with analyzing and understanding the roles of parenting in human development. Methodological assessments of parenting sometimes show similar, sometimes different patterns of findings reflective of different approaches to the same problem. In one study, frequencies of behaviors of mothers and infants in two cultures based on continuous coding were compared with frequencies based on time-sampling, and resulting patterns of findings were evaluated. Time-sampling and continuous coding gave different estimates of absolute frequency of typical maternal and infant behaviors between individuals and between cultural groups. However, time-sampling adequately preserved the relative ranking of mother and infant behaviors among individuals and between cultural groups. If research is concerned with the relative standing of individuals and/or groups on frequency of maternal or infant behaviors, then (under specified circumstances) time-sampling and continuous coding yield comparable results. America is a country composed of acculturating peoples; the countries of origin of those acculturating peoples are constantly changing; and the nature of acculturation itself is elusive. Current U.S. Census statistics indicate that one out of every five children under the age of 18, or 14 million children, in the United States are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrant parents. Yet acculturation as a scientific phenomenon is not well understood; moreover, acculturation is a major transforming force on child health and human development. In the CFRS we study families acculturating to the U.S. from Japan and from South America. We assess acculturation and the role of acculturation on parenting, child development, and family life. The capacity to categorize objects, events, and other aspects of experience lies at the core of adaptive, intelligent behavior. In this context, categorization refers to the treatment of discriminable entities as equivalent in some way. Without this ability, every distinct encounter with the environment would demand a unique response, a demand that would quickly exceed human capability. When treating similar entities as equivalent, functionally relevant information about each one can be stored in a unified manner instead of being stored redundantly across each instance. Furthermore, accessing the representations that are associated with a given category can furnish information about completely novel entities as soon as those entities are categorized. Thus, categorization not only grants an economical manner in which to organize knowledge and skill, but also allows us to extend that knowledge and skill beyond the limits of our own direct experience. Because of its far-reaching adaptive significance, research in the CFRS is concerned with the origins and early development of categorization. An accumulation of evidence now indicates that human infants are surprisingly capable of formulating and representing categories of visual information.