Abstract
Google Glass for Children With Autism
A new smartphone app that pairs with a Google Glass headset uses facial recognition software to give the wearer real-time updates on which emotions people are expressing. The program can alert the wearer when someone is expressing a particular emotion by displaying an emoticon on-screen. The headset’s camera records the faces of people in the child’s field of view and feeds that information to a smartphone app. The app, trained on hundreds of thousands of face photos, is designed to recognize eight core expressions: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, fear, contempt, and calm. When the app recognizes an expression of one of these feelings, it sends the information to the Google Glass wearer—either by naming the emotion through the headset speaker or by displaying an emoticon on a small screen in the corner of the right spectacle frame. In a pilot trial, 14 children with autism spectrum disorder used this program at home for an average of just over 10 weeks. After treatment, the kids showed improved social skills, including increased eye contact and ability to decode facial expressions.
Daniels, J., Ouillon, J. S., Voss, C., Haber, N., Fazel, A., Kline, A., . . . & Wall, D. P. (2018). Exploratory study examining the at-home feasibility of a wearable tool for social-affective learning in children with autism. npj Digital Medicine, 1, Article 32. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-018-0035-3
Learning in Abused Children
Abused children may be physically attacked by their parents. This leads them to see the world as a place where positive responses to good behavior happen inconsistently, if at all. And this physical abuse affects children’s ability to learn how to act at school and elsewhere. This can lead to the problem behaviors often seen in abused children. Researchers studied decision-making in abused kids. Their experiments showed that physically abused kids lag behind others in learning to make choices that lead to a reward. This was true even after many trials. Researchers studied 41 physically abused and 40 nonabused kids between the ages of 12 and 17 years. All were similarly bright and successful in school. In one experiment, kids saw a picture of a bell or a bottle. Researchers told them to choose one of those objects to earn points they could exchange for toys. Kids who got enough points could choose from several cool toys in the lab. These included a chemistry set and a glow-in-the-dark model of the solar system. Kids with fewer points would choose from plainer toys, such as a Frisbee or colored pencils. During 100 trials, one of these pictures earned points for the kids 80% of the time it was selected. The other picture got them points only 20% of the time. In a second round of 100 trials, one randomly chosen image resulted in points 70% of the time, versus 30% for the other image.
Both groups of kids chose higher point images more often as the experiment went on. This showed that they all gradually learned the values of the images. But physically abused kids lagged behind. They chose the more-rewarding image in 131 out of 200 trials, on average, compared with nonabused kids who picked that image in 154 out of 200 trials. If abused kids have trouble learning new rules about rewards, it indeed could lead to behavior problems later on.
Hanson, J., van den Bos, W., Roeber, B. J., Rudolph, K. D., Davidson, R. J., & Pollak, S. D. (2017). Early adversity and learning: Implications for typical and atypical behavioral development. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58, 770–778. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12694
Screen Time and Health Recommendations
Nearly two out of three U.S. kids spend more than 2 hr a day looking at screens, and those children perform worse on memory, language, and thinking tests than kids who spend less time in front of a device, the study of more than 4,500 eight- to eleven-year-olds shows. Researchers used data from child and parent surveys on daily screen time, exercise, and sleep collected as part of a larger effort called the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. As a benchmark for the new study, the researchers used expert guidelines set in 2016 that recommend no more than 2 hr of recreational screen time a day, an hour of exercise, and between 9 and 11 hr of nighttime sleep. Only 5% of the children met all three guidelines on screen time, exercise, and sleep the survey revealed. Twenty-nine percent of the children did not meet any of the guidelines, meaning that “they’re getting less than nine hours of sleep, they’re on their screens for longer than two hours and they were not being physically active.” On average, the children in the study spent 3.6 hr a day using screens for video games, videos, and other fun. Children who spent less than 2 hr on screens scored, on average, about 4% higher on a battery of thinking-related tests than the kids who did not meet any of the screen, exercise, or sleep guidelines, the researchers found. The study cannot say whether screen time—or the resulting absence of other activity—lowered thinking skills in children. The authors suggested it could be that smarter kids are less likely to spend lots of time on screens.
Walsh, J. J., Barnes, J. D., Cameron, J. D., Goldfield, G. S., Chaput, J. P., Gunnell, K. E., . . . & Tremblay, M. S. (2018). Associations between 24 hour movement behaviours and global cognition in US children: A cross-sectional observational study. Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 2, 783–791. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-4642(18)30278-5
Age and Language Learning
A crucial period for learning the rules and structure of a language lasts up to around age 17 or 18. Previous research had suggested that grammar-learning ability flourished in early childhood before hitting a dead end around age 5. If that were true, people who move to another country and try to learn a second language after the first few years of life should have a hard time achieving the fluency of native speakers. In a large online sample (over half a million), people who started learning English as a second language in an English-speaking country by age 10 to 12 ultimately mastered the new tongue as well as folks who had learned English and another language simultaneously from birth, the researchers say. Both groups, however, fell somewhat short of the grammatical fluency displayed by English-only speakers.
After ages 10 to 12, new-to-English learners reached lower levels of fluency than those who started learning English at younger ages because time ran out when their grammar-absorbing ability plummeted starting around age 17. In another surprise, modest amounts of English learning among native and second-language speakers continued until around age 30, although most learning happened in the first 10 to 20 years of life.
Because the researchers did not test children younger than age 7, they could not adequately assess how long it really takes to learn English. The researchers claim that learning takes a total of 30 years, leading to their estimate that the critical period of learning comes to an end at age 17. In this study, people who were bilinguals from birth fell short of peak English grammar scores achieved by English-only speakers. This result is consistent with evidence that bilinguals cannot easily turn off one language while speaking another. Interactions between tongues spoken by one person may slightly depress how much can be learned about both languages, even if bilingual communication still reaches high levels.
Hartshorne, J., Tenenbaum, J., & Pinker, S. (2018). A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition, 177, 263–277. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.04.007
Bullying and Disabilities
Research suggests that incidents of bullying and other harassment targeting children with disabilities vary depending on what sort of special needs a child has. A study looking at the experiences of 791 young people ages 10 to 20 across the country found that those with learning disabilities were more likely to experience in-person harassment while those with physical disabilities were more often victimized online. Youth with depression experienced both online and in-person harassment. The study is based on data collected through a telephone survey known as the Technology Harassment Victimization study.
Kimberly, M. W., Mitchell, J., Jones, L. M., & Turner, H. A. (2019). Peer harassment among youths with different disabilities: Impact of harassment online, in person, and in mixed online and in-person incidents. Children & Schools, 41(1), 17–24.
Diagnosis of ADHD
Younger children in a school grade cohort may be more likely to receive a diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than their older peers because of age-based variation in behavior that may be attributed to ADHD rather than to the younger age of the children. Most U.S. states have arbitrary age cutoffs for entry into public school. Therefore, within the same grade, children with birthdays close to the cutoff date can differ in age by nearly 1 year.
The study population included 407,846 children in all U.S. states who were born in the period from 2007 through 2009 and were followed through December 2015. Researchers used data from a large insurance database to compare the rate of ADHD diagnosis among children born in August with that among children born in September in states with and states without the requirement that children be 5 years old by September 1 for enrollment in kindergarten. ADHD diagnosis was determined on the basis of diagnosis codes from the International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision. The rate of ADHD diagnosis among children in states with a September 1 cutoff was 85.1 per 10,000 children among those born in August and 63.6 per 10,000 children among those born in September, an absolute difference of 21.5 per 10,000 children. The rate of ADHD treatment was 52.9 per 10,000 children among those born in August and 40.4 per 10,000 children among those born in September, an absolute difference of 12.5 per 10,000 children. (95% CI, 2.43 to 22.4).
Layton, T. J., Barnett, M. L., Hicks, T. R., Jena, A. B. (2018). Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and month of school enrollment. New England Journal of Medicine, 379, 2122–2130.
Autism and Abuse
In a recent study, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were nearly 2.5 times more likely to be reported to the Child Abuse Hotline by the age of 8. Researchers examined 24,306 children, out of which 387 were diagnosed for autism, for eight years. They found more than 17% of those identified with ASD had been reported to the Child Abuse Hotline, compared with 7.4% of children without ASD. Additionally, girls with ASD were six times more likely to have substantiated allegations of maltreatment than boys with ASD.
Fisher, M. H., Epstein, R. A., Urbano, R. C., Vehorn, A., Cull, M. C., & Warren, Z. (2019). A population-based examination of maltreatment referrals and substantiation for children with autism spectrum disorder. Autism, 23(5), 1335–1340.
Long-Term Outcomes of ADHD
In a recent study, researchers examined the behavior of nearly 1,000 boys from low-socioeconomic neighborhoods between the ages of 5 and 6 years old in April 1984 and followed up 30 years later in December 2015. They reported that young boys who displayed disruptive behavior and had trouble paying attention in kindergarten earned an average of $1,295 less per year in their mid-30s than those who displayed more positive social behavior. Hyperactivity, opposition, and aggression were not associated with earnings, but inattention was associated with lower earnings later on. The study also showed that positive behaviors at this age—like helping, sharing and cooperating—were associated with an increase in annual earnings of about $400 for the same time period among the same group. It has long been known that disruptive behaviors are tied to negative outcomes in the long term, but this study showed that inattention had an even stronger correlation to lower earnings than lower IQ or family adversity. The researchers stated that the regulatory skills children needed to be successful in schools are the same skills that are needed to be successful in work. They suggest that inattentive behavior displayed by children is often caused by two major factors: overstimulation and understimulation. Children who grow up in overstimulating or stressful environments may have trouble focusing in class. On the other side of the spectrum, children who are understimulated can also have trouble focusing at school, as they find it more difficult to focus on tasks they find boring.
Vergunst, F., Tremblay, R. E., Nagin, D., Algan, Y., Beasley, E., Park, J., … Côté, S. M. (2019). Association of behavior in boys from low socioeconomic neighborhoods with employment earnings in adulthood. JAMA Pediatrics, 173(4), 334–341.