What are the foundational abilities that young children must develop at the beginning of school for their future academic success? Little is known about how emotion knowledge, social behaviour, and locomotor activity are associated and how these abilities may be predictors of academic-mathematic performance (less correlated with the children’s SES than pre-reading and linguistic achievement) in a large cohort of preschool children. Here we show that emotion knowledge, locomotor activity, social behaviour, and academic-mathematic performance are interrelated in 706 French preschool children aged 3 to 6. Mediation analyses reveal that the increase in academic-mathematic performance is explained by the increases in emotion knowledge and social behaviour and, in turn, children with a greater comprehension of emotions tend to have better locomotor skills and higher academic-mathematic scores. Additionally, sequential mediation analysis reveals that the increase in emotion knowledge, locomotor activity and social behaviour partially explains the increase in academic-mathematic performance. These results are discussed in relation to three possible mechanisms. Our findings are consistent with the political and scientific consensus on the importance of social-emotional abilities in the academic world at the beginning of school and suggest adding locomotor activity to these foundational abilities.
The goal of this study was to examine the visual preference towards socially salient stimuli, using a low-cost eye-tracking device in a group of typically developing (TD) Ecuadorian preschoolers aged 11 to 60 months, from rural and urban areas, and from families with low to high socioeconomic status (SES). Series of original stimuli inspired by those used in Western experiments on the early detection of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were proposed in two eye-tracking tasks. Two types of movements (human vs. object) were presented in task 1, and dynamic speaking faces in task 2. Parental perceptions of the adaptability of the low-cost eye-tracking device used here were also investigated through a questionnaire. The analyses of mean fixation times showed a visual preference for human movements compared to moving objects whatever age, residency location or SES. In task 2, visual preference for the mouth’s area compared to the eyes’ area was observed in specific conditions, modulated by residency location and SES but not by age. The analyses of the parental perception indicated that the eye-tracking technique is well accepted. The findings suggest that these stimuli, along with the experimental procedure and low-cost eye-tracking device used in the present study may be a relevant tool that can be used in clinical settings as a contribution to the early identification of at-risk factors of ASD in low- and middle-income contexts.
Using facial gestures (especially lip reading) is known to improve speech comprehension. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, most teachers wear masks. This can affect learning to read, especially for children with poor phonemic discrimination skills. In this study, a group of children at risk for reading failure and a not at risk group were assessed from age 5 to 7. These two groups were formed according to their scores on a phonemic discrimination test at age 5: the "Atrisk group" (N = 39) and the "Not-at-risk group" (N = 46). To test the effect of not being able to rely on lip reading on the phonemic test, a syllabic counting task was given to the same groups of children at age 5 and 7 under two conditions: with the possibility to read lips or without (the stimuli were either pronounced by the experimenter or pre-recorded with no visual component). The results revealed a positive effect of lip-reading condition only for the at-risk group at both ages, with scores which remained similar over time. By contrast, scores for the not-at-risk group increased between the two ages, whatever the lip-reading condition. These results suggest that in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in which teachers wear masks, this condition may interfere with learning to read for children at risk due to poor phonemic discrimination skills.
Individuals with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD) experience a combination of severe cognitive and motor impairments frequently associated with additional sensory deficits and numerous medical disorders. The purpose of the present study was to propose an experimental paradigm based on eye-tracking that combines various pre-existing tasks from infancy research as an assessment tool. This would enable the investigation of social-emotional abilities in nine young individuals with PIMD through their visual preferences for different types of stimuli. The first objective was to test the feasibility of this paradigm, by expecting individuals to look more at the tasks’ presentation screen than elsewhere during its implementation. The second objective was to investigate whether PIMD individuals exhibit visual preferences for (a) biological (vs. non-biological) motion, (b) socially salient (vs. non-social) scenes, (c) the facial area of the eyes (vs. the mouth), (d) happy (vs. angry) faces, (e) objects of joint attention (vs. non-looked at ones), and for (f) prosocial (vs. anti-social) behaviors similar to those of a control group of typically developing children aged two years on average. Overall, the feasibility of this paradigm proved to be good, resulting in high individual looking rates that were not affected by the presentation or the content of the tasks. Analyses of individual social-emotional abilities, supported by the visual preference patterns of each PIMD individual, firstly revealed strong—but expected—variability both within and between subjects, and secondly highlighted some individual task-specific abilities although few similarities between these individual results and those of the control group were found. These findings underline the great relevance of using this type of paradigm for assessing PIMD individuals and thus contribute to a better understanding of their social and emotional development.
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