Developmental Science Colloquium - Casey Lew-Williams / Infants Learn From The Messy Dynamics of Their Natural Communicative Environments
Developmental Science Colloquium - Casey Lew-Williams / Infants Learn From The Messy Dynamics of Their Natural Communicative Environments
September 14, Princeton Professor of Psychology Casey Lee-Williams presents a talk at the Developmental Science Colloquium, exploring how "Infants learn from the messy dynamics of their natural communicative environments."
Abstract
During natural communication, caregivers pitch information at infants, and infants figure out what to pay attention to across milliseconds and months. In doing so, they make progress in detecting and then running with meaningful, naturally variable structure in their environments. I will present a few recent studies examining how caregivers package language to infants, how infants learn patterns in the complexities of their input, and how infant-adult dyads align their brains and behaviors during natural play. I will also present findings suggesting that such alignment is relevant to children's learning of new information. The data collectively suggest that messy statistics embedded in everyday communication are key to understanding the consequential nature of early learning.