A central question in infant spatial cognition concerns
infants form abstract categories of spatial relations such as support (
) and containment (
). Prior work suggests two different possibilities ...regarding the role of attention to objects in infants' formation of abstract categories of spatial relations: Attention to objects may compete with (and thus hamper) attention to the spatial relations between them, or assist with encoding of the spatial relation information. Using eye-tracking, we examined how infants' visual attention to objects related to their successful formation of an abstract category of support relations (i.e., an object
another).
Thirty-eight 8-month-old infants' eye movements were recorded during a support categorization task, where infants were habituated to four dynamic events depicting support relations (e.g., resting a block on a box) and then presented with test events that depicted either a support or containment relation with objects that they had seen or not seen in the habituation phase. Based on their looking time to the familiar versus novel spatial relation in the test, infants were classified into two groups: categorizers, who formed an abstract category of a support relation, and non-categorizers, who did not do so.
During their initial phase of learning (i.e., the first habituation trial), categorizers paid greater attention to the object moved by a hand (i.e., the dynamic object) in comparison to non-categorizers, whereas their attention to the static object or their gaze shifts between the two objects did not differ. In addition, when presented with novel objects in a novel spatial relation after habituation, only categorizers displayed asymmetric attention between the objects, attending to the dynamic object more than the static object. Gaze shifts and attention to the concave area (i.e., hole) of the container did not differ between categorizers and non-categorizers.
These findings suggest that infants' focused attention to an object in motion may play a key role in young infants' spatial category learning, and support the idea that attention to objects can assist with encoding of the spatial relational information.
This study investigated five-year-olds’ priority between shared preference and group membership in resource allocation, social preference, and social evaluation. Using a forced-choice resource ...allocation task and a friend choice task, we first demonstrate that five-year-old children distribute more resources to and prefer a character who shares a preference with them when compared to a character who has a different preference. Then, we pitted the shared preference against group membership to investigate children’s priority. Children prioritized group membership over shared preference, allotting more resources to and showing more preference toward characters in the same group who did not share their preferences than those from a different group who shared their preferences. Lastly, children evaluated resource allocation and social preference in others that prioritized group membership or shared preference. Children regarded prioritization of group membership more positively than prioritization of shared preference from the perspective of a third person. The results suggest that children by five years of age consider group membership as of greater importance than shared preference not only in their own resource allocation and social preference, but also in their evaluation of others’ resource allocation and liking.
Reactor pressure vessel (RPV) is in the center of the nuclear containment building and houses nuclear fuel, there is a risk of a nuclear power plant radiation leakage accident in the event of an ...earthquake. It is important to determine stress intensities that evaluate structural integrity and also analyze the seismic response of RPV in order to prevent severe disasters. We propose a stress intensity regression model using a signal extraction method and machine learning in addition to the existing method. The combined way between the methods from finite element model enables us to predict the stress intensity immediately with only signal features and properties. It could be an additional verification tool to ensure safety of nuclear power plants.
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has been disrupting the daily lives of people across the world, causing a major concern for psychological well-being in children. This study aimed to examine (1) how life ...satisfaction and its potential predictors have been affected by the pandemic among school-aged children in Korea, and (2) which factors would predict their life satisfaction during the pandemic. We surveyed 166 fourth-graders in the Seoul metropolitan area to assess their psychological well-being and potentially related variables during the pandemic. The data were compared with those available from two pre-COVID-19 surveys, the 2018 Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey (
= 1236) and the 2019 Korean Children and Youth Well-being Index Survey (
= 334). Higher levels of stress were observed in children during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, the level of their life satisfaction remained unchanged when compared with data from the pre-COVID-19 surveys. The pandemic also affected peer relationship quality and susceptibility to smartphone addiction, but not perceived parenting style nor academic engagement. Interestingly, peer relationship quality no longer predicted life satisfaction during the pandemic; perceived parenting styles and parent-child conversation time predicted life satisfaction. The results suggest a central role of parent-child relationship in supporting the psychological well-being of school-aged children during the pandemic.
•Abstract objects better facilitate preschoolers’ spatial analogies than realistic objects.•The advantage of abstract objects is most evident in cross-type transfer.•Children’s locative vocabulary is ...linked with their spatial analogy skills.
We tested young children’s spatial reasoning in a match-to-sample task, manipulating the objects in the task (abstract geometric shapes, line drawings of realistic objects, or both). Korean 4- and 5-year-old children (N=161) generalized the target spatial configuration (i.e., on, in, above) more easily when the sample used geometric shapes and the choices used realistic objects than the reverse (i.e., realistic-object sample to geometric-shape choices). With within-type stimuli (i.e., sample and choices were both geometric shapes or both realistic objects), 5-year-old, but not 4-year-old, children generalized the spatial relations more easily with geometric shapes than realistic objects. In addition, children who knew more locative terms (e.g., “in”, “on”) performed better on the task, suggesting a link to children’s spatial vocabulary. The results demonstrate an advantage of geometric shapes over realistic objects in facilitating young children’s performance on a match-to-sample spatial reasoning task.
•Tested infant support categorization across differences in object visual features.•Infants of 8months and those of 14months participated.•Infants, particularly those of 8months, formed a support ...category with decorated but not plain objects.•Perceptual features of objects matter in infant spatial categorization.•Eight-month-old infants can form a support category in ideal learning settings.
The current study investigated infant spatial categorization of a support relation across differences in the perceptual features of the objects. Infants of 8 and 14months (N=67) were habituated to dynamic support events with objects that were plain and monochromatic or those that were embellished with decorations (e.g., polka dots, feathers). Infants were then tested with events that presented a novel pair of objects, a novel spatial relation (i.e., containment), or both. Infants, particularly those of 8months, formed an abstract categorical representation of a support relation when habituated with the decorated objects but not the plain objects. The results suggest that the perceptual features of objects can facilitate infants’ categorization of spatial relations, at least in some learning settings and especially with younger infants.
Two experiments examined infants' ability to form a spatial category when habituated to few (only 2) or many (6) exemplars of a spatial relation. Sixty-four infants of 10 months and 64 infants of 14 ...months were habituated to dynamic events in which a toy was placed in a consistent spatial relation (in or on) to a referent object. At 10 months, infants formed a spatial category (looking longer at an unfamiliar than familiarized spatial relation) only when habituated to 6 exemplars. At 14 months, infants formed the spatial category regardless of the number of habituation exemplars. The results highlight developmental changes in infant spatial categorization and show that increasing exemplar number facilitates this ability in infants of 10 months.
Objectives: This study tested four- and five-year-old children’s analogical transfer of spatial relations from samples consisting of either richly decorated geometric shapes or concrete objects. It ...also examined whether young children would transfer containment relations more readily than they would transfer support relations, and whether the difference between children’s transfer of containment and support relations would vary with object type and age.
Methods: Four- and five-year-old children (N = 73) recruited in Busan were presented with a spatial analogies task adopted from Huttenlocher and Levine (1990). Children were asked to transfer containment and support relations from samples consisting of either richly decorated geometric shapes or concrete objects, to three choices consisting of concrete objects.
Results: First, four-year-olds successfully transferred containment relations only from concrete objects, whereas five-year-olds did so from both types of objects. Second, four-year-olds failed to transfer support relations regardless of object type, whereas five-year-olds successfully transferred support relations from richly decorated geometric shapes. Third, five-year-olds overall showed better performance than four-year-olds. Finally, children transferred containment relations more readily than they transferred support relations only when the samples consisted of concrete objects (but not when the samples were geometric shapes).
Conclusion: The results suggest that children’s transfer of spatial relations overall improves between ages four and five years and that young children’s transfer of support relations (less salient spatial relations than containment) may benefit from the use of geometric shapes. KCI Citation Count: 1
Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) is a major cause of acute neonatal brain injury and can lead to disabling long-term neurological complications. Treatment for HIE is limited to supportive care ...and hypothermia within 6 h injury which is reserved for full-term infants. Preclinical studies suggest the potential for cell-based therapies as effective treatments for HIE. Some clinical trials using umbilical cord blood cells, placenta-derived stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), and others have yielded promising results though more studies are needed to optimize protocols and multi-center trials are needed to prove safety and efficacy. To date, the therapeutic effects of most cell-based therapies are hypothesized to stem from the bystander effect of donor cells. Transplantation of stem cells attenuate the aberrant inflammation cascade following HIE and provide a more ideal environment for endogenous neurogenesis and repair. Recently, a subset of MSCs, the multilineage-differentiating stress-enduring (Muse) cells have shown to treat HIE and other models of neurologic diseases by replacing dead or ischemic cells and have reached clinical trials. In this review, we examine the different cell sources used in clinical trials and evaluate the underlying mechanism behind their therapeutic effects. Three databases-PubMed, Web of Science, and ClinicalTrials.gov-were used to review preclinical and clinical experimental treatments for HIE.
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