Infant Shared Book Reading
Infant Shared Book Reading
Shared book reading has been found to have broad developmental benefits for language,
 socio-emotional and cognitive development. However, the effects of shared book reading on
 infant development are not well understood. Although healthcare professionals and educators
 ask parents to read books to their infants early and often, the book reading experience
 itself has never been systematically investigated in infancy. This work is guided by two
 specific aims and is expected to result in a better understanding of the effectiveness of
 shared book reading as a tool for supporting parent-infant interactions and infant learning
 across the first year of life. The first aim of the proposed research is to determine the
 extent to which infant and parent visual attentional coupling during shared book reading
 predicts later: a) infant selective attention and b) infant and parent neural coupling. The
 second aim of the proposed work is to determine the extent to which books with
 individually-named characters (e.g., "Boris", "Fiona") increases parent-infant joint
 attention and infant selective attention relative to books with generic labels (e.g., "Bear",
 "Bear") or no labels and whether attention differs by age. To address the aims of this
 project, a cross-sectional sample of 6-, 9-, and 12-month old infants and their parents will
 come to the laboratory and read a book that includes three distinct character labeling
 conditions (individual names, generic category labels, no label). During infant-parent shared
 book reading joint attention will be measured using dual eye-tracking. Infants and parents
 will then return to the lab the next day and infant selective attention and infant-parent
 neural synchrony will be measured using EEG frequency tagging while infants and their parent
 view familiar characters across labeling conditions as well as unfamiliar characters. If the
 aims of the proposed research are achieved, we will have determined the extent to which
 parent-infant joint attention prompts subsequent selective processing of book content in 6-,
 9-, and 12-month old infants.
Inclusion Criteria:

 -  Infants will be included if they are typically developing and between 5.5 and 12.5
 months of age, as well as their caregiver.

 -  Parents 18-65 years old

 Exclusion Criteria:

 1. Infants who were born more that 14 days premature.

 2. Infants who with a history of neurological or visual deficits.

 3. Infants with a history of seizures or a disorder that includes risk of seizures.

 4. Infants with a parent that has a history of seizures of a disorder that includes risk
 of seizures.

 5. Parents with a history of seizures or a disorder that includes risk of seizures.