Infants experience the world through their actions with objects and their interactions with other people, especially their parents. Prior research has shown that school-age children with hearing loss experience poorer quality interactions with typically hearing parents, and difficulties in controlling their visual attention. In the current study, we used mobile eye-tracking to investigate parent-child interactions in toddlers with and without hearing loss. Parents and toddlers engaged in a goal-directed, interactive task that involved inserting coins into a slot and required joint coordination between the parent and the child. We examined the visual behaviors of the toddlers and the scaffolding behaviors of the parents. In contrast to previous work, preliminary findings reveal a pattern of potential similarities between deaf and hearing toddlers or their parents.

The ability to predict others actions is fundamental to successful joint action, communication, and theory of mind. Re-search has shown that infants predict other peoples actions across a variety of laboratory tasks. However, it is unknownwhether the action prediction skills that infants demonstrate during screen-based eye-tracking tasks scale up to real-lifeaction contexts, and whether they relate to general learning abilities. To address these questions, we used head-mountedeye-tracking to investigate action prediction and visual sequence learning during live parent-child interactions. Findingsreveal that 18-month-old infants predict reaching actions during the majority of trials, and that their gaze latencies becomefaster as they learn 3-step action sequences. These findings demonstrate that infants can learn sequence regularities andanticipate the actions of other people in live, naturalistic contexts, as they have been shown to do in traditional laboratorycontexts. This research contributes new insight into early cognitive and social development.

Developmental theory considers action prediction as one of several processes involved in determining how infants come to perceive and understand social events (Gredebäck & Daum, 2015). Action prediction is observed from early in life and is considered an important social-cognitive skill. However, knowledge about infant action prediction is limited to evidence from screen-based eye-tracking tasks. Little is known about action prediction in real-life action contexts. Our aim in the current study was to provide new evidence on whether and how infants anticipate actions in free-flowing parent-child interaction. Using dual head-mounted eye- tracking, we analyzed infants’ visual anticipations of their parents’ reaching actions while they played with objects together. Findings reveal that infants anticipate their parents’ actions at a rate higher than would be expected by chance.

Evolutionary biologists have long sought to disentangle phylogenetic relationships among taxa spanning the tree of life, an increasingly important task as anthropogenic influences accelerate population declines and species extinctions, particularly in insects. Phylogenetic analyses are commonly used to identify unique evolutionary lineages, to clarify taxonomic designations of the focal taxa, and to inform conservation decisions. Advances in DNA sequencing techniques have increasingly facilitated the ability of researchers to apply genomic methods to phylogenetic analyses, even for non-model organisms. Stoneflies are non-model insects that are important bioindicators of the quality of freshwater habitats and landscape disturbance as they spend the immature stages of their life cycles in fresh water, and the adult stages in terrestrial environments. Phylogenetic relationships within the stonefly genus Suwallia (Insecta: Plecoptera: Chloroperlidae) are poorly understood, and have never been assessed using molecular data. We used DNA sequence data from genome-wide ultraconserved element loci to generate the first molecular phylogeny for the group and assess its monophyly. We found that Palearctic and Nearctic Suwallia do not form reciprocally monophyletic clades, and that a biogeographic history including dispersal, vicariance, and founder event speciation via jump dispersal best explains the geographic distribution of this group. Our results also strongly suggest that Neaviperla forcipata (Neave, 1929) is nested within Suwallia, and the concept of the genus Suwallia should be revised to include it. Thus, we formally propose a new taxonomic combination wherein Neaviperla forcipata (Neave, 1929) is reclassified as Suwallia forcipata (Neave, 1929). Moreover, some Suwallia species (e.g., S. amoenacolens, S. kerzhneri, S. marginata, S. pallidula, and S. starki) exhibit pronounced cryptic diversity that is worthy of further investigation. These findings provide a first glimpse into the evolutionary history of Suwallia, improve our understanding of stonefly diversity in the tribe Suwallini, and highlight areas where additional research is needed.

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure.