Gemma Taylor

University of Salford, Psychology, Faculty Member

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I am a Lecturer in Developmental Psychology at the University of Salford.

I research children's learning and memory development and I'm particularly interested in how children learn from media including television, storybooks and touchscreen apps. I'm currently running an exciting research project investigating children's word learning from touchscreen apps.

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Investigating the association between children’s screen media exposure and vocabulary size in the UK

Journal of Children and Media

Children are growing up in a digital age with increasing exposure to television and touchscreen d... more Children are growing up in a digital age with increasing exposure to television and touchscreen devices. We tested whether exposure to screen media is associated with children's early language development. One hundred and thirty-one highly educated caregivers of UK children aged 6-36 months completed a media exposure questionnaire and vocabulary measure. 99% of children were read to daily, 82% watched television, and 49% used mobile touchscreen devices daily. Regression analyses revealed that time spent reading positively predicted vocabulary comprehension and production scores at 6-18 months, but time spent engaging with television or mobile touchscreen devices was not associated with vocabulary scores. Critically, correlations revealed that time spent reading or engaging with other non-screen activities was not offset by time spent engaging with television or mobile touchscreen devices. Thus, there was no evidence to suggest that screen media exposure adversely influenced vocabulary size in our sample of highly educated families with moderate media use. Children grow up surrounded by media including books, television, and more recently, mobile touchscreen devices. In a 2013 survey, television was the most popular medium with 31% of 0-2-year-old and 67% of 2-4-year-old American children watching television at least once a day for a total 44 and 64 min a day, respectively (Rideout, 2013). However, mobile touchscreen use among children appears to be increasing. In 2013 in the US, 6% of children under the age of 2 years were using mobile touchscreen devices, for 2 min per day on average (Rideout, 2013). In 2015 in France, 21% of children under the age of 2 years were using mobile touchscreen devices (Cristia & Seidl, 2015). On top of screen media exposure, children in the US under the age of 2 years also spend on average 19 min per day reading, and children aged 2-4 years spend around 29 min reading per day (Rideout, 2013). Time spent engaging with screen media impacts parent-child interactions. There is some evidence that screen time displaces time spent interacting with parents or doing other activities between 0 and 2 years of age (Vandewater, Bickham, & Lee, 2006). Specifically, Vandewater et al. (2006) found that children interacted with parents 52 mins less for each hour of time spent

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The role of verbal labels on flexible memory retrieval at 12-months of age

The provision of verbal labels enhances 12-month-old infants’ memory flexibility across a form ch... more The provision of verbal labels enhances 12-month-old infants’ memory flexibility across a form change in a puppet imitation task (Herbert, 2011), although the mechanisms for this effect remain unclear. Here we investigate whether verbal labels can scaffold flexible memory retrieval when task difficulty increases and consider the mechanism responsible for the effect of language cues on early memory flexibility. Twelve-month-old infants were provided with English, Chinese, or empty language cues during a difficult imitation task, a combined change in the puppet’s colour and form at the test (Hayne et al., 1997). Imitation performance by infants in the English language condition only exceeded baseline performance after the 10-min delay. Thus, verbal labels facilitated flexible memory retrieval on this task. There were no correlations between infants’ language comprehension and imitation performance. Thus, it is likely that verbal labels facilitate both attention and categorisation during encoding and retrieval.

Eye tracking infants: Investigating the role of attention during learning on recognition memory

In the present study, eye tracker methodology was used to explore whether there were age-related ... more In the present study, eye tracker methodology was used to explore whether there were age-related changes in the focus of infant attention during a learning
event and subsequent recognition memory for event features. Six- and 9-month old infants watched a video of an adult demonstrating a sequence of actions
with an object while visual attention was recorded using an eye tracker. At both ages, attention was focused primarily on the object and person, with the
background attended to for approximately 12% of their viewing time. Recognition memory for the person, object and background from the video was
assessed immediately using a Visual Paired Comparison procedure. Despite focusing on the central features while watching the target video, infants
showed only limited evidence of recognition memory for the individual components of the event. Taken together, these findings suggest that the early
age-related changes in memory performance seen in the literature may not be the result of age-related changes in attentional focus during encoding.

Infant face interest is associated with voice information and maternal psychological health

Early infant interest in their mother's face is driven by an experience based face processing sys... more Early infant interest in their mother's face is driven by an experience based face processing system, and is associated with maternal psychological health, even within a non clinical community sample. The present study examined the role of the voice in eliciting infants’ interest in mother and stranger faces and in the association between infant face interest and maternal psychological health.
Infants aged 3.5-months were shown photographs of their mother's and a stranger's face paired with an audio recording of their mother's and a stranger's voice that was either matched (e.g., mother's face and voice) or mismatched (e.g., mother's face and stranger's voice). Infants spent more time attending to the stranger's matched face and voice than the mother's matched face and voice and the mismatched faces and voices. Thus, infants demonstrated an earlier preference for a stranger's face when given voice information than when the face is presented alone. In the present sample, maternal psychological health varied with 56.7% of mothers reporting mild mood symptoms (depression, anxiety or stress response to childbirth). Infants of mothers with significant mild maternal mood symptoms looked longer at the faces and voices compared to infants of mothers who did not report mild maternal mood symptoms. In sum, infants’ experience based face processing system is sensitive to their mothers’ maternal psychological health and the multimodal nature of faces.

Infant and adult visual attention during an imitation demonstration

by Gemma Taylor and Jane Herbert

Deferred imitation tasks have shown that manipulations at encoding can enhance infant learning an... more Deferred imitation tasks have shown that manipulations at encoding can enhance infant learning and memory performance within an age, suggesting that brain maturation alone cannot fully account for all developmental changes in early memory abilities. The present study investigated whether changes in the focus of attention during learning might contribute to improving memory abilities during infancy. Infants aged 6, 9, and 12 months, and an adult comparison group, watched a video of a puppet imitation demonstration while visual behavior was recorded on an eye tracker. Overall, infants spent less time attending to the video than adults, and distributed their gaze more equally across the demonstrator and puppet stimulus. In contrast, adults directed their gaze primarily to the puppet. When infants were tested for their behavioral recall of the target actions, "imitators" were shown to have increased attention to the person and decreased attention to the background compared to "non-imitators." These results suggest that attention during learning is related to memory outcome and that changes in attention may be one mechanism by which manipulations to the learning event may enhance infant recall memory.

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The development of contour processing: evidence from physiology and psychophysics

by Gemma Taylor, Alecia Moser, and Daniel Hipp

Object perception and pattern vision depend fundamentally upon the extraction of contours from th... more Object perception and pattern vision depend fundamentally upon the extraction of contours from the visual environment. In adulthood, contour or edge-level processing is supported by the Gestalt heuristics of proximity, collinearity, and closure. Less is known, however, about the developmental trajectory of contour detection and contour integration. Within the physiology of the visual system, long-range horizontal connections in V1 and V2 are the likely candidates for implementing these heuristics. While post-mortem anatomical studies of human infants suggest that horizontal interconnections reach maturity by the second year of life, psychophysical research with infants and children suggests a considerably more protracted development. In the present review, data from infancy to adulthood will be discussed in order to track the development of contour detection and integration. The goal of this review is thus to integrate the development of contour detection and integration with research regarding the development of underlying neural circuitry. We conclude that the ontogeny of this system is best characterized as a developmentally extended period of associative acquisition whereby horizontal connectivity becomes functional over longer and longer distances, thus becoming able to effectively integrate over greater spans of visual space.

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Investigating the association between children’s screen media exposure and vocabulary size in the UK

Journal of Children and Media

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The role of verbal labels on flexible memory retrieval at 12-months of age

Eye tracking infants: Investigating the role of attention during learning on recognition memory

Infant face interest is associated with voice information and maternal psychological health

Infant and adult visual attention during an imitation demonstration

by Gemma Taylor and Jane Herbert

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The development of contour processing: evidence from physiology and psychophysics

by Gemma Taylor, Alecia Moser, and Daniel Hipp

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