How infant-directed actions enhance infants' attention, learning, and exploration: Evidence from EEG and computational modeling.

ABSTRACT: When teaching infants new actions, parents tend to modify their movements. Infants prefer these infant-directed actions (IDAs) over adult-directed actions and learn well from them. Yet, it remains unclear how parents' action modulations capture infants' attention. Typically, making movements larger than usual is thought to draw attention. Recent findings, however, suggest that parents might exploit movement variability to highlight actions. We hypothesized that variability in movement amplitude rather than higher amplitude is capturing infants' attention during IDAs. Using EEG, we measured 15-month-olds' brain activity while they were observing action demonstrations with normal, high, or variable amplitude movements. Infants' theta power (4-5 Hz) in fronto-central channels was compared bet

SUBMITTER: Meyer M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10078262 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature