Rachel Barr

• PhD
• Managing Director at Georgetown University

The American Academy of Pediatrics has historically discouraged media exposure for children under two due to the absence of evidence supporting its benefits and the potential for negative effects (AAP, 2011); however, the AAP has begun to recognize that all screen time may not be equal (Brown, Shifrin, & Hill, 2015). For example, many young childre...

This study examined the effect of a “ghost” demonstration on toddlers’ imitation. In the ghost condition, virtual pieces moved to make a fish or boat puzzle. Fifty-two 2.5- and 3-year-olds were tested on a touchscreen (no transfer) or with 3D pieces (transfer); children tested with 3D pieces scored above a no demonstration baseline, but children te...

Early childhood is characterized by memory capacity limitations and rapid perceptual and motor development [Rovee-Collier (1996). Infant Behavior & Development, 19, 385–400]. The present study examined 2-year olds’ reproduction of a sliding action to complete an abstract fish puzzle under different levels of memory load and perceptual feature suppo...

Interactional quality has been shown to enhance learning during book reading and play, but has not been examined during touch screen use. Learning to apply knowledge from a touch screen is complex for infants because it involves transfer of learning between a two-dimensional (2D) screen and three-dimensional (3D) object in the physical world. This...

Our emotional trajectories make up our affective experience—but these can be disrupted during mental illness. This study focuses on affect anchored to the parenting context (i.e., daily emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from children, and feeling fed up) to assess whether the way parenting affect fluctuates relates to dysfunction: parental b...

Our emotional trajectories make up our affective experience—but these can be disrupted during mental illness. This study focuses on affect anchored to the parenting context (i.e., daily emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from children, and feeling fed up) to assess whether the way parenting affect fluctuates relates to dysfunction: parental b...

The complex associations between child media use and development cannot be fully understood through screen time estimates alone. Parental motivations for media use are one of the factors that may shape the quality of media experiences and ultimately child development and family well-being. However, validated scales to capture parents’ motivations f...

Growing evidence linking media use to worse child outcomes highlights a need to understand mechanisms driving media use. Past research links media use to infant negative affect, and parents report using media to cope. However, trait-level measures can mask within-person effects that reflect mechanisms more directly. In the current study, 401 predom...

Technoference” is a term that describes how parent media use (e.g., phone use) can interfere with parent–child relationships and interactions. Research has shown technoference effects on parents and children ranging in age from infancy to adolescence, such as decreased parent responsiveness and adverse child behavioral outcomes. However, potential...

This chapter summarizes research on digital media, cognition, and brain development throughout childhood. Rapid brain development produces age-related differences in children’s responses to media and the potential impact of media on cognition. In infancy, cognitive constraints limit whether and how infants learn from media, although they learn unde...

This chapter explores the unique advantages and limitations of video chat for young children. We argue that the screen time debate has at times lacked nuance and that video chat represents an opportunity for young children to engage with and learn from their loved ones when physically separated. We also discuss limitations of video chat, such as pe...

The digital media landscape is rapidly shifting, and some children begin using digital media in infancy. As with book reading, young children need adult guidance to learn from digital media. Joint media engagement (JME) occurs when preschool children and their parents actively use digital media together. JME during early childhood is associated wit...

Memory develops across the course of the first years of life and is influenced by daily experiences, such as exposure to media like books and television. Memory as tapped by Deferred imitation (DI) requires that toddlers form a representation of the target actions that they can later use to reproduce the actions and in addition to measuring memory...

Bilingual environments provide a commonplace example of increased complexity and uncertainty. Learning multiple languages entails mastery of a larger and more variable range of sounds, words, syntactic structures, pragmatic conventions, and more complex mapping of linguistic information to objects in the world. Recent research suggests that bilingu...

Introduction Parents often use media to manage their own or their child's emotions and behaviors, which is called “regulatory media use.” While the use of media to alleviate negative emotions and behaviors may be helpful in the short-term, there may be negative consequences in the long-term (e.g., for children's development of self-regulatory skill...

Screen time, defined as estimates of child time spent with digital media, is considered harmful to very young children. At the same time, the use of digital media by children under five years of age has increased dramatically, and with the advent of mobile and streaming media can occur anywhere and at any time. Digital media has become an integral...

Aim Media use is widespread and rising, but how often and for what purpose young children use media varies, which has differential impacts on development. Yet little work has measured how and why children under 36 months use digital media or media's consequences for language. Methods The current study measures how and why 17‐ to 30‐month‐old child...

Infants face the constant challenge of selecting information for encoding and storage from a continuous incoming stream of data. Sleep might help in this process by selectively consolidating new memory traces that are likely to be of future relevance. Using a deferred imitation paradigm and an experimental design, we asked whether 15‐ and 24‐month‐...

The trajectories and patterns in our emotions are essential to understanding our affective experience, which is not stationary but ebbs and flows. This study focuses on affect anchored in the context of parenting: daily emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from children, and feeling fed up. We specifically examined whether dysfunction in parent...

Our emotional trajectories make up our affective experience—but these can be disrupted during mental illness. This study focuses on affect anchored to the parenting context (i.e., daily emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from children, and feeling fed up) to assess whether the way parenting affect fluctuates relates to dysfunction: parental b...

Aim This study addresses the scarcity of longitudinal research on the influence of screen media on children. It aims to explore the longitudinal relationship between children's vocabulary development and their exposure to screen media. Methods The study, initiated in 2017, included 72 children (37 boys) in Östergötland, Sweden, at three key develo...

General Audience Summary Young children are growing up in an increasingly complicated digital world. Rapid expansion and adoption of technology by families with young children has resulted in frequent use of digital media during early childhood. It is well-known that learning from media during early childhood is challenging. Each child is different...

The majority of research on media use in the digital age during early childhood has consisted of parental reports or experimental lab research; however, little research has captured media use in the home. Thus, the purpose of the current study was to capture early childhood media use in the moment it occurs. Participants included 231 parent–child d...

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,...

The development of problematic media use in early childhood is not well understood. The current study examined long-term associations between parental media efficacy, parental media monitoring, and problematic media use across a three-year period of time during early childhood. Participants included 432 parents who reported on their own parenting a...

Background: In the context of increased media use and family distress during the pandemic, we examine whether preschooler screen time at age 3.5 contributes to later expressions of anger/frustration at 4.5, while also considering the inverse association. Methods: Data are from a cohort of 315 Canadian preschool-aged children during the COVID-19...

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...

There is ample evidence that young children's screen media use has sharply increased since the outbreak of the novel 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19). However, the long-term impact of these changes on children's adjustment is currently unclear. The goals of the current study were to assess longitudinal trajectories of young children's screen med...

Millions of children in the United States are growing up hearing multiple languages. Memory flexibility is the ability to apply information from a past experience to future situations that are perceptually different from the initial learning experience and differs between monolinguals and bilinguals during infancy. We use a new, non-verbal object s...

Introduction/purpose: Wearables that include a color light sensor are a promising measure of electronic screen use in adults. However, to extend this approach to children, we need to understand feasibility of wear placement. The purpose of this study was to examine parent perceptions of children's acceptability of different sensor placements and f...

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...

We developed a new object sequencing imitation (OSI) task for preschoolers. We parameterized the task to test the effects of working memory load in 56 3- to 5-year-old children in a museum. We tested individual groups of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds on both “low” (2- to 4-step) and “high” (3- to 5-step) memory load sequences on two variants of the task....

Recent research has started to examine problematic media use in early childhood. However, the vast majority of research has been questionnaire based, has assumed relative within-person stability in problematic media use patterns, and has rarely examined antecedents to problematic media use. We utilized an ecological momentary assessment design (EMA...

Although prior research has independently linked vocabulary development with toddlers' media usage, parental mental state talk (MST), and parent–child conversational turn‐taking (CTT), these variables have not been investigated within the same study. In this study, we focus on associations between these variables and 2‐year‐old's (N = 87) vocabular...

Aims and objectives The aim of this manuscript is to provide an overview of the population and languages studied and the methods and practices surrounding the definition of bilingualism in children below age 3. Methodology A quantitative descriptive scoping review Data and analysis From 530 articles, we identified 127 papers (167 studies) that me...

Extensive evidence and theory suggest that the development of motor skills during infancy and early childhood initiates a "developmental cascade" for cognitive abilities, such as reading and math. Motor skills are closely connected with the development of spatial cognition, an ability that supports deductive reasoning. Despite the linkage between m...

Beginning during infancy, digital media are a pervasive part of family life, affecting opportunities to learn and time in family relationships. Research showing the potentially negative impacts of media on very young children led to recommendations of restricted media usage. Other research has examined how educational media can promote child outcom...

Aims and Objectives The aim of this manuscript is to provide an overview of the population and languages studied and the methods and practices surrounding the definition of bilingualism in children below age three.MethodologyA quantitative descriptive scoping reviewData and AnalysisFrom 530 articles, we identified 127 papers (167 studies) that met...

When children learn their native language, they tend to treat objects as if they only have one label—a principle known as mutual exclusivity. However, bilingual children are faced with a different cognitive challenge—they need to learn to associate two labels with one object. In the present study, we compared bilingual and monolingual 24‐month‐olds...

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...

Studies have demonstrated that parents often exhibit a still face while silently reading their cell phones when responding to texts. Such disruptions to parent-child interactions have been observed during parental media use such as texting and these disruptions have been termed technoference. In the present study, we explored changes to mother-chil...

Background Heavy media use has been linked to sleep problems in children, which may also extend to the infancy period. While international parent-advisory agencies, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (2016), advise no screen time before 18 months, parents often do not follow this recommendation. Research on Italian infants’ early access to...

Digital media (DM), such as cellphones and tablets, are a common part of our daily lives and their usage has changed the communication structure within families. Thus, there is a risk that the use of DM might result in fewer opportunities for interactions between children and their parents leading to fewer language learning moments for young childr...

Humans imitate patently irrelevant actions known as overimitation, and rather than decreasing with age, overimitation increases with age. Whereas most overimitation research has focused on social factors associated with overimitation, comparatively little is known about the cognitive- and task-specific features that influence overimitation. Specifi...

Observed disruptions to parent-child interactions during parental media use, such as texting, have been termed technoference. For example, when a language learning interaction was disrupted by a phone call, toddlers were less likely to acquire the word. Other studies demonstrated that parents often exhibit a still face while silently reading inform...

When children learn their native language, they tend to treat objects as if they only have one label—a principle known as mutual exclusivity (ME). However, bilingual children are faced with a different cognitive challenge—they need to learn to associate two labels with one object. In the present study, we compared bilingual and monolingual 24-month...

Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non‐verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as th...

The language environment is important for the development of early communication and language. In the current study, we describe the natural home language environment of 9-month-old infants in Sweden and its concurrent association with language development. Eighty-eight families took part in the study. The home language environment was measured usi...

Abstract Many families today use video chat to help their babies develop or maintain relationships with remote family members; however, there is very little existing research that systematically compares infant emotional engagement during face-to-face and video mediated interactions. A laboratory experiment was carried out with 49 infants between t...

Digital media availability has surged over the past decade. Because of a lack of comprehensive measurement tools, this rapid growth in access to digital media is accompanied by a scarcity of research examining the family media context and sociocognitive outcomes. There is also little cross-cultural research in families with young children. Modern m...

Working memory (WM) develops rapidly during early childhood. In the present study, visual WM (VSM) was measured using the well‐established Spin the Pots task (Hughes & Ensor, 2005), a complex non‐verbal eight‐location object occlusion task. A self‐ordered hiding procedure was adopted to allow for an examination of children's strategy use during a V...

Background and objectives: Child mobile device use is increasingly prevalent, but research is limited by parent-report survey methods that may not capture the complex ways devices are used. We aimed to implement mobile device sampling, a set of novel methods for objectively measuring child mobile device use. Methods: We recruited 346 English-spe...

Developmental science theory and empirical research on refugee situations requires an updated approach to the study of trauma as a multi-systemic and multilevel phenomenon. We present a theoretical framework that integrates developmental science approaches to highlight critical threats to development in situations of violent displacement. Given the...

Background: Media use is pervasive among young children. Over 95% of homes in the US have one or more televisions, and access to screen-based media continues to grow with the availability of new technologies. Broadly, exposure to large amounts of screen-based media is negatively related to language and literacy skills; however, questions remain as...

Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously attend to what other people attend to, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants,...

This article provides a description of eye movement data collected during an ocular-motor serial reaction time task. Raw gaze data files for 63 infants and 24 adults along with the data processing and analysis script for extracting saccade latencies, summarizing participants' performance, and testing statistical differences, are hosted on Open Scie...

Procedural memory underpins the learning of skills and habits. It is often tested in children and adults with sequence learning on the serial reaction time (SRT) task, which involves manual motor control. However, due to infants' slowly developing control of motor actions, most procedures that require motor control cannot be examined in infancy. He...

Typically developing (TD) children exhibit a transfer deficit imitating significantly less from screen demonstrations compared to a live demonstrations. Although many interventions for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) include video materials, little research exists comparing the effectiveness of video demonstration over live instruction...

Bilingual infants from 6‐ to 24‐months of age are more likely to generalize, flexibly reproducing actions on novel objects significantly more often than age‐matched monolingual infants are. In the current study, we examine whether the addition of novel verbal labels enhances memory generalization in a perceptually complex imitation task. We hypothe...

Media is so pervasive that it should no longer be considered a nuisance variable that could affect development; rather, it should be seen as a fundamental part of the context in which development occurs. Despite the rapid growth in access to digital media, there is a scarcity of research examining changes in the family media ecology and the subsequ...

The use of global, standardized instruments is conventional among clini-cians and researchers interested in assessing neurocognitive development. Exclusively relying on these tests for evaluating effects may underestimate or miss specific effects on early cognition. The goal of this review is to identify alternative measures for possible inclusion...

Multiple factors influence imitation during toddlerhood, including task complexity, social contingency, and individual differences. We conducted a secondary data analysis of individual differences in self‐generated labelling using data collected from a complex puzzle imitation task with 355 2‐ to 3‐year‐olds. This analysis indicated that toddlers’...

Why do fathers matter? Recent conceptual and theoretical advances regarding father–child relationships have demonstrated that fathers affect children's outcomes both directly and indirectly. To attain a complete developmental account of the ecologically rich contexts of child development, in this article, we recommend best practices regarding the c...

This collection of research chapters and commentaries was organized around the myriad and intersecting roles that child factors, content attributes, and contextual features play in determining which, whether, and why young children are affected by media exposure. By considering the young child as embedded in and interacting with particular contexts...

Although many relatives use video chat to keep in touch with toddlers, key features of adult-toddler interaction like joint visual attention (JVA) may be compromised in this context. In this study, 25 families with a child between 6 and 24 months were observed using video chat at home with geographically separated grandparents. We define two types...

Today, a deployed father can still interact and even play with his infant at home. In fact, families report using video chat services like Skype or FaceTime to help their children develop and maintain relationships with remote grandparents and with parents who are separated from them by work), divorce, immigration, or military deployment). This cha...

The majority of media exposure for children under 8 years consists of television. Studies examining associations between media exposure and developmental outcomes suggest that television effects are dependent upon content (e.g., educational content predicts positive outcomes, entertainment content predicts poorer outcomes). Preschool children have...

As children’s exposure to touchscreen technology and other digital media increases, so does the need to understand the conditions under which children are able to learn from this technology. The prevalence of screen media in the lives of young children has increased significantly over the last two decades. The use of touchscreen devices among 2-4-y...

This book discusses the burgeoning world of young children’s exposure to educational media and its myriad implications for research, theory, practice, and policy. Experts across academic disciplines and the media fill knowledge gaps and address concerns regarding apps, eBooks, and other screen-based technologies—which are being used by younger and...

The current study examined if bilingual advantages in cognitive control influence memory encoding during a divided attention task. Monolinguals, simultaneous bilinguals, and sequential bilinguals switched between classifying objects and words, then were tested for their recognition memory of stimuli previously seen during the classification task. C...

In contrast to other primates, human children's imitation performance goes from low to high fidelity soon after infancy. Are such changes associated with the development of other forms of learning? We addressed this question by testing 215 children (26–59 months) on two social conditions (imitation, emulation) – involving a demonstration – and two...

During the first 5 years of life, the versatility, breadth, and fidelity with which children imitate 15 change dramatically. Currently, there is no model to explain what underlies such significant changes. To that end, the present study examined whether task-independent but domain-specific—elemental— imitation mechanism explains performance across...

Humans excel at mirroring both others' actions (imitation) as well as others' goals and intentions (emulation). As most research has focused on imitation, here we focus on how social and asocial learning predict the development of goal emulation. We tested 215 preschool children on two social conditions (imitation, emulation) and two asocial condit...

Humans excel at mirroring both others' actions (imitation) as well as others' goals and intentions (emulation). As most research has focused on imitation, here we focus on how social and asocial learning predict the development of goal emulation. We tested 215 preschool children on two social conditions (imitation, emulation) and two asocial condit...

Young children typically demonstrate a transfer deficit, learning less from video than live presentations. Semantically meaningful context has been demonstrated to enhance learning in young children. We examined the effect of a semantically meaningful context on toddlers’ imitation performance. Two- and 2.5-year-olds participated in a puzzle imitat...

Although children’s contact with involved, committed, nonresidential fathers can improve social, emotional, cognitive, and academic outcomes, fathers have largely been absent from parenting interventions that overlook men’s role as a critical parenting partner. This article details research showing that young incarcerated fathers’ attitudes about—a...

Socioeconomic status (SES) is strongly associated with cognition and achievement. Socioeconomic disparities in language and memory skills have been reported from elementary school through adolescence. Less is known about the extent to which such disparities emerge in infancy. Here, 179 infants from socioeconomically diverse families were recruited....

The specificity of the bilingual advantage in memory was examined by testing groups of monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual 24-month-olds on tasks tapping cued recall, memory generalization and working memory. For the cued recall and memory generalization conditions, there was a 24-h delay between time of encoding and time of retrieval. In additi...

Bilingual advantages in memory flexibility, indexed using a memory generalization task, have been reported (Brito & Barr, 2012; 2014), and the present study examines what factors may influence memory performance. The first experiment examines the role of language similarity; bilingual 18-month-old infants exposed to two similar languages (Spanish-C...