Lab and lounge: relating measures of visual working memory from naturalistic to laboratory setting in rural India

Aneja, Prerna (2022) Lab and lounge: relating measures of visual working memory from naturalistic to laboratory setting in rural India. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

Preview

PDF Download (46MB) | Preview

Abstract

Research from laboratory and naturalistic settings, has argued for the importance of visual cognition for infants’ early development and noted its predictive value for later social and cognitive developmental outcomes. To date, however, few research studies have explored the relationship between measures of visual cognition in the lab and the real world. The aim of this thesis is to understand whether individual differences in visual attention measured during caregiver-infant interaction relate to individual differences in measures from a visual working memory (VWM) laboratory task. The thesis adopts an eco-cultural perspective by embedding this question in the cultural and socio-emotional context of the caregivers and its connections to their infants. Studies 1 and 2 focus on laboratory measures of caregivers and infants respectively, and on their connection to the socio-emotional context of the caregiver in a low-resource setting. Findings suggest that caregivers’ socioemotional context influences their own VWM performance but not that of their infants. In addition, caregiver and infant VWM performances were inversely related to each other. Study 3 uses a machine learning pipeline developed in Chapter 3 to assess dyadic interactions from participants in India, as well as from a UK group of dyads (high resource setting). Interactions were recorded by using head-mounted eye trackers, with the machine learning pipeline being used to extract measures of visual attention in a naturalistic context. Findings revealed similarities and differences across the cultural groups in line with culturally normative parenting styles. The final study (Chapter 5) links measures of infants’ visual cognition from the lounge and the lab, exploring the associations between parental and infant visual cognition as measured across settings. In Chapter 6, findings are integrated and the contributions to the literature are discussed. We further consider how the insights from our research can help inform future parent-focused interventions.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2023 09:57
Last Modified:	10 Jul 2023 09:57
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/92577
DOI:

Downloads

Actions (login required)

View Item