This paper discusses findings from online surveys completed by parents of 0–3-year-old children in Norway, Portugal and Japan concerning their young children’s use of touchscreen technology. The study investigated parental practices, views and perspectives related to children’s digital practices and explored these in relation to wider cultural discourses around early childhood in the participant countries. The study adopted Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory to inform the questionnaire and interpretative data analysis of how parents’ views and experiences are influenced by a wide range of social, cultural and personal factors. The findings demonstrate some coherence between beliefs among parents regarding very young children’s use of touchscreen technologies and their place in the children’s home lives. Quantitative and qualitative results highlight that the respondents from all countries expressed the need for further guidance regarding technology use, and better communication with early education and care centres. The study findings are discussed in relation to the reported uses of touchscreen technologies in the three different cultural contexts, parents’ views on the benefits and/or disadvantages of children’s touchscreen technology use, and the potential influences of dominant cultural discourses on parents’ perceptions, views and practices.

Intervention of executive function during early childhood is an important research topic. This study examined the effect of a child-friendly intervention program, where children interacted with a doll or a puppet. Children were presented with cognitive shifting tasks before and after an intervention. In the intervention, children interacted with a doll or a puppet, and taught rules of the cognitive shifting tasks to the object. As the results, 3- to 5-year-old children significantly improved the performances and strengthened activations in the lateral prefrontal regions as measured by near-infrared spectroscopy. The results suggest that interaction with a doll or a puppet may have a significant impact on the development of executive function.

The authors examined age-related differences in target discrimination before the saccade to investigate the influence of aging on the facilitation of target discrimination by shifts of attention. Older and younger adults made saccades toward a peripheral stimulus after its onset and discriminated the orientation of the stimulus. Mean saccadic latency was greater for older adults than for younger adults. Facilitation of target discrimination immediately before the saccades was found both in older and younger adults. These results suggest that aging affects the properties of saccades but does not affect the properties of attentional shifts immediately before a saccade.

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This study aimed to investigate the thermal environment and thermal comfort of elderly occupants living in elder care facilities and to compare the quality of sleep, in all four seasons, of these elderly occupants. A total of 16 healthy participants with a mean age of 80 ± 5 years (range, 70–87 years) were recruited in two elderly facilities, of which, 13 participated in all four measurements. The sleep parameter was measured by a wrist actigraph which the participants were requested to wear and analyzed with commercial software using the Cole–Kripke algorithm, to assign scores for sleeping and waking patterns. Both ambient temperature (Ta) and relative humidity (Rh) levels were found to be lower in the winter and higher in the summer. The Ta in the summer and Rh in the winter were not within the scope of the Japanese Standard for Maintenance of Sanitation in Buildings, as the central HVAC and air conditioners were turned off due to the absence of facility managers. More than 50% of the elderly occupants used fans and increased airflow by opening windows during the summer nights as an adaptive thermal approach. The slope of the relationship between prevailing mean outdoor temperature and indoor Ta determined in this study was similar to the adaptive model and the regression line lies over the upper limits of the adaptive model. No significant difference was found in the sleep parameter among the four seasons; however, a sex difference was found in the sleep latency and length of waking period during the sleep. The sleep parameters such as sleep efficiency indexes were significantly better for elderly women than men. The adaptive approach is not enough to improve the sleep efficiency of sleeping elderly people even within the acceptable temperature range based on the thermal comfort, especially for elderly men.