Jennifer M.  Zosh

Pennsylvania State University, Brandywine · Human Development and Family Studies

Grandparents who were separated from their infant grandchildren during COVID-19 sought other ways to connect, including video chat. Video chat supports learning, and its features (e.g., contingent responsiveness) may allow for cultural exchange. However, technological problems may disrupt these exchanges. In a seminaturalistic, longitudinal study,...

Published in the American Journal of Play (Access here: https://www.museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2023/04/15-1-Article-2-Transforming-Toybox.pdf) The authors examined technological and traditional infant toys to understand the U.S. toy market facing today’s care givers. They found significant differences in the two types of toys in terms of their d...

STAGE 1 - REGISTERED REPORT Although the presence of toys in childhood has remained steady for decades, the types of toys that fill children’s toy boxes have changed, especially over the last 10–15 years. Many of today’s toys are marked by technological enhancements, from a shape sorter driven by a singing bear to robotic plastic animals designed...

Many grandparents today are physically separated from their families. Given that maintaining close family relationships (with both adult children and grandchildren) is associated with increased physical, mental, and emotional health across generations, it is important to determine how families can maintain close relationships with grandparents when...

COVID‐19 disrupted infant contact with people beyond the immediate family. Because grandparents faced higher COVID‐19 risks due to age, many used video chat instead of interacting with their infant grandchildren in person. We conducted a semi‐naturalistic, longitudinal study with 48 families, each of whom submitted a series of video chats and surve...

High-quality language interactions not only support children’s language development but also promote better long-term academic outcomes (Hirsh-Pasek, Adamson et al., 2015; Huttenlocher et al., 2010; Pace et al., 2019; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). Interactions in the form of frequent back-and-forth conversations between caregiver and child predict la...

Public space interventions offer one example of how to translate cognitive science into the public square. Here, we detail several successful projects and the six principles of learning that underlie them that support caregiver–child engagement, interaction, and the use of content area–specific language. Policy and community implications are also d...

Video chat may allow young children and grandparents to develop and maintain bonds when they are physically separated because it enables them to share experiences with each other in real time. We used an ecological model framework to examine factors associated with the development of the grandparent–grandchild relationship during the COVID‐19 pande...

Experts have expressed concerns about the lack of evidence demonstrating that children’s “educational” applications (apps) have educational value. This study aimed to operationalize Hirsh-Pasek, Zosh, and colleagues' Four Pillars of Learning into a reliable coding scheme (Pillar 1: Active Learning, Pillar 2: Engagement in the Learning Process, Pill...

Children's caregivers are their first play partners, and toys influence the quality of these caregiver-child interactions-with research suggesting that electronic toys are not as supportive of these interactions as traditional toys. In this study, we investigate (1) toy use amongst care-givers and infants, with an eye towards investigating the prev...

Participating in play affords physical, social, and cognitive benefits. Here, we review the cognitive behavioral science literature highlighting the value of play and describe the different types of play along with the evidence linking play to positive outcomes for children in areas such as social-emotional, cognitive, academic, and social-emotiona...

Modern libraries are reimagining their spaces as more than repositories for books. The Play-and-Learn Spaces project married developmental science with the changing nature of 21st century libraries. The study asked if it is possible to augment learning in informal spaces using the built environment to encourage discourse and interaction. For this p...

Focused on community play memories, the goals of this project were to (1) uncover the variety and degree of playful learning memories; (2) ascertain whether community members would spontaneously share memories of play, and (3) appraise whether memories differed between low-income and mixed-income communities. Results indicated that although communi...

In this chapter, we will explore explanations for this conflicting evidence, and importantly, demonstrate the power of evidence-based recommendations for e-book use. In an effort to compare traditional books and e-books, this chapter will apply four pillars of learning generated from the Science of Learning (Hirsh-Pasek K, Zosh JM, Golinkoff RM, Gr...

This white paper presents emerging evidence that playful practices can support a variety of learning outcomes, and that educators and caregivers have a critical role in facilitating young children’s learning through play. It offers key insights around realising playful practices in early learning settings serving children aged three to six – what w...

Defining play has plagued researchers and philosophers for years. From describing play as an inaccessible concept due to its complexity, to providing checklists of features, the field has struggled with how to conceptualize and operationalize “play.” This theoretical piece reviews the literature about both play and learning and suggests that by vie...

Digital media and electronic toys are changing the landscape of childhood. How does this change impact language learning? In this chapter, we explore potential alignment between six established principles of language learning and children's engagement with digital media and electronic toys. We argue that electronic toys and digital media are not so...

This white paper looks at the most recent research on the role and importance of play for children’s life and learning. It concludes that the evidence on learning through play is mounting, that engaging with the world in playful ways is essential for a child and lays a foundation for learning, especially in the early years of life. Beyond infancy a...

There is a substantial body of research, across a number of disciplines, arguing for the importance of play in human development, and, in some cases, proposing intriguing potential mechanisms that might explain the role of play in children’s cognitive, emotional and social learning. In this white paper, we review this evidence in relation to specif...

Neuroscience helps explain how playful experiences can support learning. In this white paper, we find that each characteristic – joy, meaning, active engagement, iteration, and social interaction – is associated with brain processes involved in learning. These processes include reward, memory, cognitive flexibility, and stress regulation that are a...

As the United States and other countries consider “educational reform,” the discussion appears to be primarily about fostering basic skills and content knowledge. Our contention is that this approach is not sufficient. Instead, we argue that for twenty-first century success, we must also foster creativity to prepare today’s children to excel and so...

Games play a significant role in childhood, fueling hours of engagement and social interaction, and probably much learning as well. Board games, card games and outdoor games (such as Tag) first come to mind, but more recently, games have also gone digital. In this piece, we offer a new perspective by placing games within the established construct o...

Technology is forever changing the landscape of children’s education in and out of school. But much of what masquerades for "educational" in the digital world, is not. In this chapter, we discuss evidence-based principles that can help parents, researchers, and teachers discover apps with real educational value. With the science of learning as a ba...

As the traditional toys of the past are quickly being replaced with electronically “enhanced” toys, it is important to understand how these changes impact parent–child interactions, especially in light of the evidence that the richness and variety of these interactions have long-term effects on diverse areas of cognition (Hart & Risley, 1995). Here...

Children are in the midst of a vast, unplanned experiment, surrounded by digital technologies that were not available but 5 years ago. At the apex of this boom is the introduction of applications ("apps") for tablets and smartphones. However, there is simply not the time, money, or resources available to evaluate each app as it enters the market. T...

Working memory is limited in adults and infants. But unlike adults, infants whose working memory capacity is exceeded often fail in a particularly striking way: they do not represent any of the presented objects, rather than simply remembering as many objects as they can and ignoring anything further (Feigenson & Carey, 2003, 2005). Here we explore...

Does making an inference lead to better learning than being instructed directly? Two experiments evaluated preschoolers' ability to learn new words, comparing their memory for words learned via inference or instruction. On Inference trials, one familiar and one novel object was presented and children were asked to Point at the [object name (i.e., p...

Accurate representation of a changing environment requires individuation-the ability to determine how many numerically distinct objects are present in a scene. Much research has characterized early individuation abilities by identifying which object features infants can use to individuate throughout development. However, despite the fact that witho...

Memory is a must for thinking about objects. We frequently reason about objects even when we lack direct perceptual evidence of their existence, as when we saccade from one visual location to another, experience darkness, or observe occlusion. In all of these cases, object representations must be stored in memory in order to support even the most b...

The number of individual items that can be maintained in working memory is limited. One solution to this problem is to store representations of ensembles that contain summary information about large numbers of items (e.g., the approximate number or cumulative area of a group of many items). Here we explored the developmental origins of ensemble rep...

A recent debate in the study of visual short-term memory (VSTM) asks whether capacity is better characterized as limited by the number of items stored (Luck & Vogel, 1997), the total information load of the items (Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2004; Xu & Chun 2006), or by a hybrid of these (Gao, Li, Liang, Chen, Yin & Shen, 2009; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Here we...

The ability to nonverbally enumerate large numbers of items in parallel (e.g., an array of 40 dots) is seemingly contradictory to the limit of 3–4 individual objects that can be stored in parallel in tasks of attention and working memory. However, recent work addressed this paradox by showing that adults can enumerate up to 3 sets of objects (e.g.,...

Working memory is a limited capacity system in which both infants and adults show an abrupt upper limit on the number of items they can store (Luck & Vogel 1997, Feigenson & Carey 2003, 2005). However, infants, unlike adults, show a catastrophic memory failure when capacity is exceeded. For example, when infants see 4 identical objects hidden and a...

JEAN MATTER MANDLER, The foundations of mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 359. ISBN 0-19-517200-0. - - Volume 32 Issue 3 - AMANDA BRANDONE, ROBERTA MICHNICK GOLINKOFF, WEI YI MA, SARA J. SALKIND, JENNIFER M. ZOSH

Two arguments are critiqued here. The first is that hominin mothers “parked” their offspring; the evidence does not support that position. The second is that motherese developed to control the behavior of nonambulatory infants. However, Falk's case is stronger if we apply it to children who are already walking and more likely to be influenced by ve...