Rachel Barr of Georgetown is one of the leading researchers on how video affects babies, and I interviewed her over lunch the other day. At one point, our talk turned to coding in psychology experiments -- that painstaking, second-by-second, task of recording even the slightest turn of a baby's head. In Barr's experiments, she and her research team are coding two things at once: They record every movement that babies make, while also measuring and taking note of every feature that appears on the TV screen the babies are watching.
In an article Barr wrote for the peer-reviewed journal Infancy, you can get a sense of how intense and methodical these procedures can be. Using a formula like that used in studies of book reading, Barr and her co-authors measured how video -- and particular features of video -- affected the way parents and babies (12, 15 and 18 month old) responded to the content. Their work focused on 13 minutes from two videos -- Baby Mozart and the Sesame Street video Kids' Favorite Songs 2. They noted every question uttered, every movement made. What they found was that many parents do, indeed, interact with video as they do with books. They point and label. ("Do you see the ball? Where's the ball?" "There's a caterpillar!") And when they do, babies pay attention.
Not every parent in their study was a pointer and labeler, however. Some parents rarely or never talked to their babies about the video. Those cases were associated with lower levels of attention from babies. They looked at the content less.
Now, does the act of paying attention mean that babies are showing comprehension? Not necessarily. The Infancy study makes clear that we still have a ways to go before we can say exactly what and how much babies are understanding of these videos. But the same might be said about sessions of book reading. What we do know is that parental pointing and labeling is commonly associated with learning. As child development experts will tell you, it's that moment of joint attention that matters.
Note: The article is from a forthcoming issue of Infancy, not yet available online.
10:24:33 AM 
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