An examination of measures of young children's interest in natural object categories

Abstract

Developmental research utilizes various different methodologies and measures to study the cognitive development of young children; however, the reliability and validity of such measures have been a critical issue in all areas of research practices. To address this problem, particularly in the area of research on infants’ interests, we examined the convergent validity of previously reported measures of children’s interests in natural object categories, as indexed by (1) parents’ estimation of their child’s interest in the categories, (2) extrinsic (overt choices in a task), (3) intrinsic (looking time toward objects), and (4) physiological (pupil dilation) responses to objects of different categories. Additionally, we also examined the divergent validity of all the aforementioned measures against the well-established and validated measure of parents’ estimations of children’s vocabulary knowledge. Children completed two tasks: (a) an eye-tracking task, where they were presented with images from a range of defined categories, which collected indices of looking time and pupillary activity; (b) a sticker-choice task, where they were asked to choose between two sticker-images from two different categories belonging to the range of categories assessed in the previous task. Parents completed two questionnaires to estimate (i) their child’s interests and (ii) vocabulary knowledge in the categories presented. We firstly analyzed the divergent validity between the two parent measures, and found a significant positive association between them. Our successive analyses showed no strong or significant associations between any of our measures, apart from a significant positive association between children’s looking time and parents’ estimations of children’s vocabulary knowledge. From our findings, we conclude that measures of infants’ interests thus far may index various components of interest in young children, and we also suggest next steps for further validation studies in infant research.

Does young children’s interest in categories influence their familiar word-object recognition?

“…There is, therefore, a need for future research to replicate this finding. On the other hand, the suggestion that parental ratingsas opposed to the pupillary measure -predicts children's word recognition is in keeping with recent findings from our lab suggesting a link between parental ratings of children's curiosity and children's vocabulary knowledge (Madhavan et al, 2022), speaking to the validity of the parental ratings of children's curiosity as a measure of children's curiosity, vocabulary development and, tentatively, word recognition. Recent attempts to validate parental questionnaires of children's curiosity have also proved promising suggesting that parental ratings of their child's individual interests may be able to capture some of the individual differences in children (Altmann et al, 2023).…”

The quality of caregiver–child interaction is predicted by (caregivers’ perception of) their child’s interests

“…None of these six children chose the category ranked highest (or top 3 highest) according to their looking behaviour during the category interest task. While this sample is too small to allow firm conclusions, this pattern of results is in keeping with previous work suggesting that children’s explicit choice does not appear to be associated with their implicit-looking behaviour [107]. On the one hand, this may suggest that caregivers may not actually be attuned to what their child is interested in, a suggestion that has implications for the other research questions being addressed here.…”

“…Indeed, only 57.14% of caregivers chose to read a book containing objects from one of the top three categories (chance = 60%), as indicated by their child’s looking behaviour (40 out of 70). This discrepancy is mirrored in previous work from our lab showing that caregiver reports and children’s behavioural indices of interest are not associated with one another [107]. Indeed, anecdotally, neither did children’s explicit choice of the book they wanted to read correspond with their looking behaviour.…”

“…On the one hand, this may suggest that caregivers may not actually be attuned to what their child is interested in, a suggestion that has implications for the other research questions being addressed here. On the other hand, as is argued in other work [107], our behavioural index of children’s interest may not capture the same construct of interest as captured by caregivers’ reports [63]. Recently, examination of children’s looking behaviour measures have been shown to have little reliability [108], suggesting that looking behaviour may not measure our construct of interest.…”

The quality of caregiver-child interaction is predicted by (caregivers’ perception of) their child’s interests

“…Indeed, only 57.14% of caregivers chose to read a book containing objects from one of the top 3 categories (chance = 60%), as indicated by their child's looking behaviour (40 out of 70). This discrepancy is mirrored in previous work from our lab showing that caregiver reports and children's behavioural indices of interest are not associated with one another (Madhavan et al, 2022). Indeed, anecdotally, neither did children's explicit choice of the book they wanted to be read correspond with their looking behaviour.…”