WEEK 2 – Developmental psychology meets Media (part 1) from infancy to childhood //
educational media
Plugged In – Chapter 4: Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers
Valkenburg, P. M., & Piotrowski, J. T. (2017). Plugged in: How media attract and affect youth. Yale University Press.
Anyone who has ever worked with or spent time with young chil- dren knows that infants,
toddlers, and preschoolers differ considerably in their media preferences. Although some of
these young children take little or no interest in television, smartphones, or tablets, most
find them endlessly fascinating.
Child Development and Media Preferences
Although many factors can influence children’s media preference, one of its most
important predictors, particularly in the early years, is developmental level. Generally
speaking, child development can be divided into two categories:
1. Cognitive development
* Encompasses all age-specific changes associated with the way children
acquire and process information in their enviro ment
* Cognitive development helps us understand how well children are able to
pay attention and comprehend media content
* Jean Piaget (considered by many to be the founding father of developmental
psychology) proposed four successive stages of cognitive development from
infancy to adulthood. His stage-based paradigm remains among the most
widely used theories of cognitive development
2. Social-emotional development
* Helps us understand their media preferences
* It’s our ability to:
A. eExpress and recognize emotions such as happiness, sadness, jealousy, and
shame
B. Form interpersonal relationships; and to develop an identity (answering the
question “who am I?”)
Social-emotional development closely hinges on cognitive development. For example, we
would not feel shame, jealousy, or other emotions without knowledge and
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,understanding of the world in general and of interpersonal relationships in particular.
And empathy, our capacity to share another’s emotions, would be difficult to feel if we did
not understand the situation and person whose emotions we were sharing.
The notion that children’s cognitive development and social-emotional development are
strong predictors of their media preferences first arose in the 1970s, when television
researchers became interested in the cognitive effects of educational television shows.
Moderate Discrepancy Hypothesis
Why are young children interested in media content? Many researchers believe that the
concept of optimal stimulation level goes a long way toward explaining this interest.
According to this concept, children prefer content that they can at least partly fit into their
cognitive and social-emotional frame of reference. They equally avoid content that diverges
too much from that frame of reference, because they perceive such content as either too easy
or too difficult to grasp. This idea, known as the moderate discrepancy hypothesis,
predicts that children will pay the most attention to media content that diverges only
moderately from their level of cognitive and social-emotional development.
* That is, children are much more likely to pay attention to media content that does
not diverge too much from their existing knowledge and emotional experiences,
and that they avoid content that does
* The moderate discrepancy hypothesis thus offers a reasonable explanation of why
children’s media preferences change throughout childhood.
No two children are alike
In this chapter, a differentiation between two age groups in childhood is made:
A. Zero to two years (infants and young toddlers)
B. Two to five years (older toddlers and preschoolers)
Dividing childhood into age categories has its limits, however, since individual differences
among children in the same age group might thereby be underestimated or even
ignored. No two two-year- olds are alike, after all. From birth, children can respond quite
differently to the same experience. Development is driven not only by a biologically
programmed, fixed process of maturation, but equally by children’s temperament and social
environment.
Birth to two years
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,Even as newborns, infants have a strong desire for sensory experience, whether it involves
their sense of touch, hearing, or vision
* Infants as young as three months show a preference for music Orienting their head
toward all kinds of music, including lullabies and Mozart preludes
* Newborns favor the human voice above all other sounds, especially when speech is
slow and high-pitched and intonation is exaggerated in short, the form of speech
parents generally adopt when speaking to their infants
* Although newborns can hear reasonably well, their sense of vision is initially
underdeveloped
They can see colors and motion, but the images are blurry
Objects more than half a meter away are out of focus
Their vision will not match that of an adult’s until they are about eight months
old
* Infants prefer looking at human faces
They prefer to look at faces more than at any other stimulus
They also pay more attention to attractive (that is, symmetrical) faces than to
unattractive ones
* They have a preference for brightly colored moving objects (although the colors
should not be too bright)
* They can distinguish colors immediately after birth, and by the time they are one
month old they can differentiate between all colors in the spectrum
Interest in Television and Commercials
Children below the age of two spend nearly an hour a day viewing or using audiovisual
media (television, DVDs, games, tablets). Interestingly, the age at which infants and toddlers
start using media has fallen in the past decade the current age is now estimated to be
between three and five months
Given young children’s attraction to bright colors and high contrast, it makes sense that they
are most attracted to programs with colorful fantasy characters such as Teletubbies. Perhaps
surprisingly, very young children are often attracted to commercials.
Given the structure of a commercial, this actually makes a good deal of sense. The first year
of life is characterized by what some researchers refer to as the investigative-orienting system
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, of attention. In other words, children’s attention in the first year is directed mainly at objects
that are novel or surprising. And commercials, with their striking auditory and visual features
(also called orienting features), are exactly the type of content that is attuned to young
children’s system of attention. By the second year of life, as children’s attention becomes
guided less by such orienting features and more by their own cognition, they become less
attracted by novelty and more by objects that have real meaning for them.
Do stories matter for the very young?
People often think that watching television is a passive activity, but this is a misconception –
certainly where very young children are concerned.
Children usually say their first real words at about age one
* Those first words are the same in almost every language. They reflect the universal
preferences of one-year-olds, for example, people (mama, papa, grandma), animals
(dog, cat), toys (ball, dolly), food (milk, cookie), and transportation (car)
* At the same time, one-year-olds feel the need to verbally label the things that they see
or play with: 40% of children up to the age of two will call out the name of a
television character while watching a show, or say aloud the names of objects that
they see on the screen
Although very young children respond actively to media content, they usually do not yet
understand story line. Children under eighteen months are just as interested in a video clip
that mixes up beginning, middle, and end as they are in a clip with a coherent story line
* In other words, infants and young toddlers are drawn to orienting program features,
but they do not require meaningful context
* That is why long stories are inappropriate for this age group, and why so much
popular content for this audience lacks a narrative
Interest in Tablets
Although the majority of research on very young children and audiovisual media has focused
on television, many infants and toddlers today are absolutely mesmerized by smartphones
and tablets. An ABC News report in 2013 demonstrated rather persuasively that most
toddlers seem to prefer a tablet to a pile of colorful toys. One toddler in the news story even
preferred a tablet to his own mother!
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