Przemyslaw Tomalski

Polish Academy of Sciences | PAN · Institute of Psychology

The role of parental behaviour in modulating infant learning during experimental studies has been rarely explored. Yet, multiple strands of research suggest that dyadic infant-parent interactions could be as important for infant learning and regulation during experimental studies with infants, as they are during their free, unconstrained play. Rece...

From early on, infants produce a variety of rhythmic behaviors—an ability that likely supports later social communication. However, it is unclear, how this rhythmic motor production changes with age. Here, we investigated the coupling between infants' arm movements across the first year of life in a social context of a rattle-shaking play with thei...

In adults, the integration of audiovisual speech elicits specific higher (super-additive) or lower (sub-additive) cortical responses when compared to the responses to unisensory stimuli. Although there is evidence that the fronto-temporal net- work is active during perception of audiovisual speech in infancy, the development of fronto-temporal resp...

From birth, we perceive speech by hearing and seeing people talk. In adults cortical representations of visual speech are processed in the putative temporal visual speech area (TVSA), but it remains unknown how these representations develop. We measured infants’ cortical responses to silent visual syllables and non-communicative mouth movements usi...

The efficient classification of body position is crucial for monitoring infants’ motor development. It may fast-track the early detection of developmental issues related not only to the acquisition of motor milestones but also to postural stability and movement patterns. In turn, this may facilitate and enhance opportunities for early intervention...

Efficient classification of body position is crucial for monitoring infants ’motor development. It may fast-track the early detection of developmental issues related not only to the acquisition of motor milestones but also to postural stability and movement patterns. In turn, this may facilitate and enhance opportunities for early intervention that a...

Dimensions of infant temperament describe behavioral responses to stimulation; however, motor systems undergo considerable changes throughout infancy, and they are also affected by caregivers’ mental well-being. In this paper, we investigate temperamental associations with high-level measures of motor system organization at 6 and 12 months of age a...

Purpose: Infants later diagnosed with autism typically have smaller vocabularies than their peers. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory (CDI) and the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) are key tools for assessing infants' language abilities, but it remains unclear what the association is between these measures in infancy, a...

Early identification of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD) allows for faster intervention, which in turn improves clinical outcomes and reduces the individual and societal costs associated with the diagnosis. The aims of the study were to 1) investigate the use of the DeepLabCut (DLC) toolbox to automatically analyze the motor patterns of infants a...

Humans pay special attention to faces and speech from birth, but the interplay of developmental processes leading to specialization is poorly understood. We investigated the effects of face orientation on audiovisual (AV) speech perception in two age groups of infants (younger: 5-to 6.5-month-olds; older: 9-to 10.5-month-olds) and adults. We record...

A child’s motor development progresses very dynamically. It is crucial to develop freely available parent-report measures of motor development that can be easily used globally to measure motor skills and identify children in need of interventions. This paper presents the adaptation and validation of the Early Motor Questionnaire, which consists of...

Early in life, infants exhibit motor overflow, which can be defined as the generation of involuntary movements accompanying purposeful actions. We present the results of a quantitative study exploring motor overflow in 4-month-old infants. This is the first study quantifying motor overflow with high accuracy and precision provided by Inertial Motio...

Рік тому (9 грудня 2021 року) ми опублікували Звернення до практиків "Двомовність - це норма". Сьогодні ми випускаємо три нові мовні версії: німецьку, українську та угорську. У зверненні наводяться основні факти щодо розвитку двомовності, з якими погоджуються дослідники з усього світу. Метою нашої ініціативи є поширення науково обґрунтованих знань...

Vor einem Jahr (9. Dezember 2021) haben wir den APPELL AN SPEZIALISTEN-PRAKTIKER "Zweisprachigkeit ist Norm" veröffentlicht. Heute veröffentlichen wir drei neue Sprachversionen: Deutsch, Ukrainisch und Ungarisch. Der Appell weist auf die grundlegenden Fakten über die zweisprachige Entwicklung hin, über die sich Forscher aus der ganzen Welt einig si...

Egy évvel ezelőtt (2021. december 9.) tettük közzé a "Kétnyelvűség a norma" című felhívást a szakemberekhez. Ma három új nyelvi változatot teszünk közzé: német, ukrán és magyar. A felhívás rámutat a kétnyelvűség fejlődésével kapcsolatos alapvető tényekre, amelyekben a világ minden tájáról érkező kutatók egyetértenek. Kezdeményezésünk célja a kétnye...

A child's motor development progresses very dynamically. It is crucial to develop freely available parent-report measures of motor development that can be easily used globally to measure motor skills and identify children in need of interventions. Here, we present the adaptation and validation of the Early Motor Questionnaire, which consists of gro...

A child’s motor development progresses very dynamically. It is crucial to develop freely available parent-report measures of motor development that can be easily used globally to measure motor skills and identify children in need of interventions. Here, we present the adaptation and validation of the Early Motor Questionnaire, which consists of gro...

Infants' attention to the mouth is thought to support language acquisition, yet this relation has been scantly tested longitudinally. This study assessed attention to the mouth and the eyes at 5.5 (n = 91; Polish, 49% females) and 11 months, between time-point changes and their associations with language development in infancy (11 months) and toddl...

Infants’ attention to the mouth is thought to support language acquisition, yet this relation has been scantly tested longitudinally. This study assessed attention to the mouth and the eyes at 5.5 (n= 91; Polish, 49% females) and 11 months, between time-point changes, and their associations with language development in infancy (11 months) and toddl...

Infants’ limb movements evolve from disorganized to more selectively coordinated during the first year of life as they learn to navigate and interact with an ever-changing environment more efficiently. However, how these coordination patterns change during the first year of life and across different contexts is unknown. Here, we used wearable motio...

Dwujęzyczność jest normą, choć wiąże się nie tylko z korzyściami, ale i z wyzwaniami! Zwracamy się do wszystkich osób, które w swojej pracy zawodowej stykają się z dziećmi dwujęzycznymi. Jesteśmy świadomi, że funkcjonowanie dzieci dwujęzycznych w kontekstach edukacyjno-społecznych ma swoją specyfikę. Dzieci te mogą wymagać wsparcia odmiennego niż d...

On 9th December 2021 a group of 23 Polish researchers working in the areas of multilingualism, child development, language acquisition and learning, speech & language disorders, and related topics, announced an appeal to all professionals working with bi- and multilingual children. The appeal points to the basic facts about bilingual development th...

In the 1st year of life, infants gradually gain the ability to control their eye movements and explore visual scenes, which support their learning and emerging cognitive skills. These gains include domain-general skills such as rapid orienting or attention disengagement as well as domain-specific ones such as increased sensitivity to social stimuli...

Recent progress in the study of infant motor development has been achieved by ground-breaking paradigm shifts combined with clever and innovative tasks that place the infant center stage as the acting subject. One of the challenges that developmental scientists are facing today is understanding the complexity of infants’ spontaneous movements. Nove...

Configural processing is a specialised perceptual mechanism that allows adult humans to quickly process facial information. It emerges before the first birthday and can be disrupted by upside-down presentation of the face (inversion). To date, little is known about the relationship of configural face processing to the emerging knowledge of audiovis...

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a non-invasive optical brain monitoring technology for mapping the functioning of the human cortex in response to sensory or motor activation. There is a growing interest in implementing fNIRS to monitor the cognitive performance of military pilots. The method relies on differences in hemoglobin abso...

Efficient visual exploration in infancy is essential for cognitive and language development. It allows infants to participate in social interactions by attending to faces and learning about objects of interest. Visual scanning of scenes depends on a number of factors and early differences in efficiency are likely contributing to differences in lear...

Eye-tracking measurement of looking is the fundamental method in infancy research. Over the last few decades it has provided many of the most significant discoveries in developmental psychology. Infants engage in looking tasks and use their bodies for learning differently from adults, yet, the breadth of their behavioural repertoire and the constra...

Multiple visual attention mechanisms are active already in infancy, most notably one supporting orienting towards stimuli and another, maintaining appropriate levels of alertness, when exploring the environment. They are thought to depend on separate brain networks, but their effects are difficult to isolate in existing behavioural paradigms. Bette...

Sensory symptoms are common in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) but the patterns of these symptoms vary. Early assessment of sensory processing is therefore crucial for diagnosis and early intervention. However, studies in this area are conducted almost exclusively in English-speaking populations. In our study, we examined sensory p...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social communication skills and flexible behaviour. Developing new treatment approaches for ASD requires early identification of the factors that influence later behavioural outcomes. One fruitful research paradigm has been the prospective study of infants with a first deg...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is commonly conceived as the extreme end of a continuum. Research suggests that autistic individuals outperform typically developing controls in visual search. Thus, enhanced visual search may represent an adaptive trait associated with ASD. Here, using a large general population sample (N = 608, aged 9–14 years), we...

Standard looking-duration measures in eye-tracking data provide only general quantitative indices, while details of the spatiotemporal structuring of fixation sequences are lost. To overcome this, various tools have been developed to measure the dynamics of fixations. However, these analyses are only useful when stimuli have high perceptual similar...

Percepcja mowy obejmuje informacje pochodzące z wielu zmysłów. Integracja informacji polimodalnych jest jednym z procesów składowych przetwarzania języka i ma istotne znaczenie dla percepcji mowy nie tylko w dorosłości, ale także od pierwszych miesięcy życia. W niniejszym artykule prezentujemy wybiórczy przegląd najważniejszych badań nad mózgowymi...

The analysis of parent-child interactions is crucial for the understanding of early human development. Manual coding of interactions is a time-consuming task, which is a limitation in many projects. This becomes especially demanding if a frame-by-frame categorization of movement needs to be achieved. To overcome this, we present a computational app...

Engagement with stakeholders is an essential part of the research process. This is particularly the case for early autism research with infant cohorts and their families, where a range of ethical issues are pertinent. Here, we report on a large survey of parents who have a child on the autism spectrum (n = 1040) which specifically probed attitudes...

Efficient attention control is fundamental for infant cognitive development, but its early precursors are not well understood. We investigated whether dyadic visual attention during parent-infant interactions at 5 months of age predicts the ability to control attention at 11 months of age. Total duration of mutual gaze was assessed during free play...

Early adversity has profound long-term consequences for child development across domains. The effects of early adversity on structural and functional brain development were shown for infants under 12 months of life. However, the causal mechanisms of these effects remain relatively unexplored. Using a visual habituation task we investigated whether...

Europe is diverse in terms of economy, cultures, socio-demography, and languages. A crucial aspect of psychiatric research is the availability of standardized screening, diagnostic, and characterization instruments. We fine-mapped the accessibility of 14 clinical scales and cognitive tests for the assessment of early childhood Autism Spectrum Disor...

Investigation into the earliest signs of autism in infants has become a significant sub-field of autism research. This work invokes specific ethical concerns such as use of ‘at-risk’ language, communicating study findings to parents and the future perspective of enrolled infants when they reach adulthood. This study aimed to ground this research fi...

Even in infancy children from low-SES backgrounds differ in frontal cortex functioning and, by the start of pre-school, they frequently show poor performance on executive functions including attention control. These differences may causally mediate later difficulties in academic learning. Here, we present a study to assess the feasibility of using...

Apart from their remarkable phonological skills young infants prior to their fi rst birthday show ability to match the mouth articulation they see with the speech sounds they hear. Th ey are able to detect the audiovisual confl ict of speech and to selectively att end to articulating mouth depending on audiovisual congruency. Early audiovisual spee...

Recent work suggests that differences in functional brain development are already identifiable in 6- to 9-month-old infants from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. Investigation of early SES-related differences in neuro-cognitive functioning requires the recruitment of large and diverse samples of infants, yet it is often difficult to per...

Efficient processing of gaze direction and facial expression of emotion is crucial for early social and emotional development. Toward the end of the first year of life infants begin to pay more attention to negative expressions, but it remains unclear to what extent emotion expression is processed jointly with gaze direction at this age. This study...

Johnson and Morton (1991) used Gabriel Horn's work on the filial imprinting model to inspire a two-process theory of the development of face processing in humans. In this paper we review evidence accrued over the past two decades from infants and adults, and from other primates, that informs this two-process model. While work with newborns and infa...

It may seem a truism to state that development is dynamic, not static. Yet the literature continues to use the pheno-typic end state of the mature adult brain as a rather static framework for understanding genotype/phenotype relations and as an explanatory model for neurodevel-opmental disorders. Indeed, disorders are often explained in terms of in...

Socioeconomic status (SES) impacts on both structural and functional brain development in childhood, but how early its effects can be demonstrated is unknown. In this study we measured resting baseline EEG activity in the gamma frequency range in awake 6-9-month-olds from areas of East London with high socioeconomic deprivation. Between-subject com...

Research on audiovisual speech integration has reported high levels of individual variability, especially among young infants. In the present study we tested the hypothesis that this variability results from individual differences in the maturation of audiovisual speech processing during infancy. A developmental shift in selective attention to audi...

The use of visual cues during the processing of audiovisual speech is known to be less efficient in children and adults with language difficulties and difficulties are known to be more prevalent in children from low-income populations. In the present study, we followed an economically diverse group of thirty-seven infants longitudinally from 6-9 mo...

Young infants are capable of integrating auditory and visual information and their speech perception can be influenced by visual cues, while 5-month-olds detect mismatch between mouth articulations and speech sounds. From 6 months of age, infants gradually shift their attention away from eyes and towards mouth in articulating faces, potentially to...

The language difficulties often seen in individuals with autism might stem from an inability to integrate audiovisual information, a skill important for language development. We investigated whether 9-month-old siblings of older children with autism, who are at an increased risk of developing autism, are able to integrate audiovisual speech cues. W...

Behavioral studies demonstrate that the efficiency of detection of faces is dependent on configural and contrast polarity information characteristic to human faces. Stimulus inversion or contrast polarity reversal can disrupt this process. We investigated whether a face-sensitive event-related potential component, the N170, is modulated by the orie...

It has been suggested that poor habituation to stimuli might explain atypical sensory behaviours in autism. We investigated habituation to repeated sounds using an oddball paradigm in 9-month-old infants with an older sibling with autism and hence at high risk for developing autism. Auditory-evoked responses to repeated sounds in control infants (a...

Recent advances in neuroimaging methods have provided new ways of unravelling the complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors that influence functional brain development in the critical first years of life. This has allowed new insights into the effects that early adverse experience can exert on the brain later in life. We review re...

Recent work suggests that a subcortical visual route may mediate rapid orienting towards faces in the visual periphery. We now demonstrate that this orienting bias towards faces shows a temporal-nasal visual field asymmetry of responses, supporting the view that it is mediated by extrageniculate pathways. Upright schematic face-like pattern elicite...

Human faces under natural illumination, and human eyes in their unique morphology, include specific contrast polarity relations that face-detection mechanisms could capitalise on. Newborns have been shown to preferentially orient to simple face-like patterns only when they contain face- or gaze-relevant contrast. We investigated whether human adult...