Parent-infant learning dynamics during early shared book reading

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PROJECT SUMMARY Shared book reading has been found to have broad developmental benefits for language, socio-emotional and cognitive development. However, the effects of shared book reading on infant development are not well understood. Although healthcare professionals and educators ask parents to read books to their infants early and often, the book reading experience itself has never been systematically investigated in infancy. This work is guided by two specific aims and is expected to result in a better understanding of the effectiveness of shared book reading as a tool for supporting parent-infant interactions and infant learning across the first year of life. The first aim of the proposed research is to determine the extent to which infant and parent visual attentional coupling during shared book reading predicts later: a) infant selective attention and b) infant and parent neural coupling. The second aim of the proposed work is to determine the extent to which books with individually-named characters (e.g., “Boris”, “Fiona”) increases parent-infant joint attention and infant selective attention relative to books with generic labels (e.g., “Bear”, “Bear”) or no labels and whether attention differs by age. To address the aims of this project, a cross-sectional sample of 6-, 9-, and 12-month old infants and their parents will come to the laboratory and read a book that includes three distinct character labeling conditions (individual names, generic category labels, no label). During infant-parent shared book reading joint attention will be measured using dual eye-tracking. Infants and parents will then return to the lab the next day and infant selective attention and infant-parent neural synchrony will be measured using EEG frequency tagging while infants and their parent view familiar characters across labeling conditions as well as unfamiliar characters. If the aims of the proposed research are achieved, we will have determined the extent to which parent-infant joint attention prompts subsequent selective processing of book content in 6-, 9-, and 12-month old infants. This study will also be the first to record dual infant and parent high density EEG during an experimental task and use neural synchrony as an outcome measure. The dual eye-tracking and EEG findings will allow for a better understanding of dyadic interactions between infants and parents. Finally, we expect that this investigation will show benefits of early shared book reading for infant development. Our long term goal is to use this data to support the inclusion of early shared book reading in early prevention programs targeting those at risk for poor health outcomes or developmental disabilities.