preprints.org > social sciences > psychology > doi: 10.20944/preprints202212.0554.v1

Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Version 1 : Received: 27 December 2022 / Approved: 29 December 2022 / Online: 29 December 2022 (04:16:43 CET)

The first years of an infant’s life represent a sensitive period for neurodevelopment and see the emergence of nascent forms of executive function (EF), which are required to support complex cognition. Few tests exist for measuring EF during infancy, and the available tests require painstaking manual coding of infant behaviour. In modern clinical and research practice, human coders collect data on EF performance by manually labelling video recordings of infant behaviour during toy or social interaction. Besides being extremely time-consuming, video annotation is known to be rater-dependent and subjective. To address these issues, starting from existing cognitive flexibility research protocols, we developed instrumented toys as a new task instrumentation and data collection tool suitable for infant use. A commercially available device comprising a Barometer and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) embedded in a 3D-printed lattice structure was used to detect when and how the infant interacts with the toy. The data collected using the instrumented toys provides a rich dataset describing the sequence of toy interaction and individual toy interaction patterns, from which EF-relevant aspects of infant cognition may be inferred. Such a tool potentially provides an objective, reliable, and scalable method of collecting early developmental data in socially interactive contexts.

Instrumented Toys; Ecological Behavioural Assessment; Executive Function Development; Inertial Motion Detection; Barometric Force Sensing; 3D Printing

Social Sciences, Psychology

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