ACTIVE ENGAGEMENTS DURING INFANCY SUPPORT COGNITIVE, PERCEPTUAL, AND NEURAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Young infants are often described as “sponges” that absorb their environment. There is an implicit assumption that infants are passive recipients of experience rather than active directors. In four complementary chapters, we challenge this popular notion of a passive infant and argue that infants can direct their own experiences via several active mechanisms and that this influences their own cognitive, perceptual, and neural development. In Chapter 1, we review prior infant research in the field and defined attention, prediction, and learning as three examples of active mechanisms that may importantly affect infants’ development. In Chapter 2, we report novel fNIRS data showing that infants’ engagement of active mechanisms—specifically, attention and prediction—is supported by an underdeveloped frontoparietal lobes and can bring about neural changes. In Chapter 3, we present novel eye-tracking data showing a bidirectional relationship between two important active mechanisms: Selective attention and learning. We argue that the reciprocal relationship between two active mechanisms may form a crucial link that catalyzes cognitive and perceptual development. In Chapter 4, we present a meta-analysis on infant research methodology to aid clean and reproducible research on how infants’ active engagement influences their developmental trajectories. Together, this thesis lays the foundation for further research on how infants’ active engagement shapes the trajectories of cognitive, perceptual, and neural development in the long-term.