Developing socio-communicative abilities is a key objective to thrive in society and educational settings.
Yet, we lack a robust, detailed, and generalizable understanding of how these abilities develop. Our understanding lacks robustness because the predominant methods show limited reliability and validity. In response, we will use modern psychometric methods to develop instruments to precisely quantify children’s socio-communicative development. Our understanding lacks detail because traditional approaches rely on
approximate measures of children’s experiences and the drivers of development. In response, we will directly sample children’s everyday experiences using wearable cameras and leverage Machine Learning methods to analyze these recordings. Our understanding is not generalizable because conventional studies focus on children from Western, affluent settings. In response, we will study development across cultures to build theories that apply globally. The project is organized into three strands: first, we use developmental milestones to study the interplay between culture-specific experiences and cognitive development in a global sample; second, we study the interplay of the constituents of socio-communicative development longitudinally in preschool children from three diverse cultural settings; and third, we
leverage new technologies to quantify children’s everyday experiences and identify the driving forces behind their socio-communicative development. Taken together, we attempt a synthesis of methods to achieve a truly robust, detailed, and generalizable understanding of socio-communicative development.