Child & Family Development in the First Decades of Life

儿童和家庭研究科（CFRS）调查的性格，经验和环境因素，有助于身体，心理，情感和社会发展的人在生命历程的头二十年。CFRS研究的总体目标是描述，分析和评估儿童发展的能力和倾向，包括他们的遗传特征，生理功能，感知和认知能力，情感，社会和互动风格，以及家庭发展的儿童和父母的性质和后果，以及儿童接触和与他们的物理环境的互动。项目设计是实验性的，纵向的，横向的，以及文化内和跨文化的。社会人口比较包括家庭社会经济地位、产妇年龄和就业状况、儿童均等和日托经验。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、秘鲁和韩国以及美国。CFRS广泛关注分析和理解养育在人类发展中的作用。对养育子女的方法评估有时显示出类似的，有时是不同的模式，反映了对同一问题的不同方法。在一项研究中，母亲和婴儿的行为频率在两种文化的基础上连续编码的频率进行了比较，基于时间采样，并由此产生的模式的结果进行了评估。时间抽样和连续编码给出了不同的估计绝对频率的典型的母婴行为之间的个人和文化群体。然而，时间抽样充分保留了个体之间和文化群体之间的母亲和婴儿行为的相对排名。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会产生可比的结果。美国是一个由文化适应民族组成的国家;这些文化适应民族的原籍国不断变化;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显示，在美国，每五个18岁以下的儿童中就有一个，即1400万儿童，要么是移民本身，要么是移民父母的子女。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个主要转化力量。在CFRS中，我们研究从日本和南美适应美国文化的家庭。我们评估文化适应和文化适应对养育子女，儿童发展和家庭生活的作用。对物体、事件和其他经验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，分类是指以某种方式将可区分的实体视为等同物。如果没有这种能力，每一次与环境的不同遭遇都需要一种独特的反应，这种反应很快就会超过人类的能力。当将类似的实体视为等同时，关于每个实体的功能相关信息可以以统一的方式存储，而不是跨每个实例冗余地存储。此外，访问与给定类别相关联的表示可以在这些实体被分类后立即提供关于全新实体的信息。因此，分类不仅赠款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我们自己的直接经验之外。由于其深远的适应意义，在CFRS的研究涉及的起源和早期发展的分类。越来越多的证据表明，人类婴儿具有令人惊讶的能力，能够形成和表达视觉信息的类别。

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.