TY - JOUR
T1 - Leveraging technological advances to assess dyadic visual cognition during infancy in high- and low-resource settings
AU - Aneja, Prerna
AU - Kinna, Thomas
AU - Newman, Jacob
AU - Sami, Saber
AU - Cassidy, Joe
AU - McCarthy, Jordan
AU - Tiwari, Madhuri
AU - Kumar, Aarti
AU - Spencer, John
N1 - Funding information: The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was supported by grant OPP1164153 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and grant R01HD083287 from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Both grants were awarded to JPS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
PY - 2024/5/30
Y1 - 2024/5/30
N2 - Caregiver-infant interactions shape infants' early visual experience; however, there is limited work from low-and middle-income countries (LMIC) in characterizing the visual cognitive dynamics of these interactions. Here, we present an innovative dyadic visual cognition pipeline using machine learning methods which captures, processes, and analyses the visual dynamics of caregiver-infant interactions across cultures. We undertake two studies to examine its application in both low (rural India) and high (urban UK) resource settings. Study 1 develops and validates the pipeline to process caregiver-infant interaction data captured using head-mounted cameras and eye-trackers. We use face detection and object recognition networks and validate these tools using 12 caregiver-infant dyads (4 dyads from a 6-month-old UK cohort, 4 dyads from a 6-month-old India cohort, and 4 dyads from a 9-month-old India cohort). Results show robust and accurate face and toy detection, as well as a high percent agreement between processed and manually coded dyadic interactions. Study 2 applied the pipeline to a larger data set (25 6-month-olds from the UK, 31 6-month-olds from India, and 37 9-month-olds from India) with the aim of comparing the visual dynamics of caregiver-infant interaction across the two cultural settings. Results show remarkable correspondence between key measures of visual exploration across cultures, including longer mean look durations during infant-led joint attention episodes. In addition, we found several differences across cultures. Most notably, infants in the UK had a higher proportion of infant-led joint attention episodes consistent with a child-centered view of parenting common in western middle-class families. In summary, the pipeline we report provides an objective assessment tool to quantify the visual dynamics of caregiver-infant interaction across high- and low-resource settings.
AB - Caregiver-infant interactions shape infants' early visual experience; however, there is limited work from low-and middle-income countries (LMIC) in characterizing the visual cognitive dynamics of these interactions. Here, we present an innovative dyadic visual cognition pipeline using machine learning methods which captures, processes, and analyses the visual dynamics of caregiver-infant interactions across cultures. We undertake two studies to examine its application in both low (rural India) and high (urban UK) resource settings. Study 1 develops and validates the pipeline to process caregiver-infant interaction data captured using head-mounted cameras and eye-trackers. We use face detection and object recognition networks and validate these tools using 12 caregiver-infant dyads (4 dyads from a 6-month-old UK cohort, 4 dyads from a 6-month-old India cohort, and 4 dyads from a 9-month-old India cohort). Results show robust and accurate face and toy detection, as well as a high percent agreement between processed and manually coded dyadic interactions. Study 2 applied the pipeline to a larger data set (25 6-month-olds from the UK, 31 6-month-olds from India, and 37 9-month-olds from India) with the aim of comparing the visual dynamics of caregiver-infant interaction across the two cultural settings. Results show remarkable correspondence between key measures of visual exploration across cultures, including longer mean look durations during infant-led joint attention episodes. In addition, we found several differences across cultures. Most notably, infants in the UK had a higher proportion of infant-led joint attention episodes consistent with a child-centered view of parenting common in western middle-class families. In summary, the pipeline we report provides an objective assessment tool to quantify the visual dynamics of caregiver-infant interaction across high- and low-resource settings.
KW - caregiver-infant dyads
KW - cognitive development
KW - Infancy
KW - Eye-tracking
KW - low-and middle-income countries (LMIC)
KW - visual attention
KW - eye-tracking
KW - infancy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85195640095&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1376552
DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1376552
M3 - Article
VL - 15
JO - Frontiers in Psychology
JF - Frontiers in Psychology
SN - 1664-1078
M1 - 1376552
ER -