Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Object-centric interactions provide rich learning moments for young children, including opportunities to discover word meanings. Children’s first-person object handling experiences, in particular, form a key source of input—one that varies across cultures and across development. Using daylong photo streams from child-worn cameras, we analyze >17k images to identify the frequency and targets of child object handling across the first four years in two small-scale subsistence farming communities on opposite sides of the globe (Rossel Papuan and Tseltal Mayan). Overall, we see general consistency in the distribution of object categories (e.g., consumables, mealtime tools, natural objects, etc.) handled by children across cultures and age, likely reflecting stable properties of children’s physical environments and day-to-day routines. However, the exact objects available to children vary both within and across communities and diversify with age. These various distributions of handling patterns are discussed in their relation to potential consequences for early learning.