Dr. Rachel Barr, Director of the Georgetown Early Learning Project at Georgetown University, and
Dr. Deborah Linebarger, Director of the Children's Media Lab, recently co-edited an issue of Infant & Child Development (
Volume 19, Issue 6). This special issue features 6 articles, all focused on issues related to the content and context of early media exposure.
The following is the special issue abstract:
Exposing infants to screen media is a hotly debated topic. Part of the debate stems from perceived inconsistencies in the accumulated evidence. Correlational research has provided a number of associations between exposure and outcomes (both positive and negative; for review see Courage & Howe, 2010). Experimental evidence shows that when learning conditions are equated infants learn less from video than from live face-to-face interactions (i.e. video deficit, Anderson & Pempek, 2005). As the research literature has accumulated, however, it has shifted from simple main effects models to more complex interaction models of analysis. This complexity is captured through the analysis of three distinct but inter-connected classes of variables that mediate and moderate the relationship between exposure and child outcomes: child attributes, stimulus features, and the contexts in which exposure occur (see Linebarger & Vaala, 2010).
There are two main purposes of this special issue: (1) empirically demonstrate the shift away from research that examines simplistic cause and effect models to research that examines the causal mechanisms underlying how effects are produced (Clark, 1983; Dupre´ & Cartwright, 1988; Hedstrom & Ylikoski, 2010; Kozma, 1994) and (2) focus on an ecological perspective and, as such, simultaneously consider the effects of content and context of early media exposure. Cause and effect models presume that learning is a receptive response to content delivery whereas models that incorporate causal mechanism-based explanations view learning as an active cognitive process influenced by the social, affective, and contextual variables present during a specific learning event (Clark, 1983). Defining causal mechanisms involves articulating the intersection among the child, the environmental context, and the ways in which both influence how a child ultimately interprets and learns from program content. An ecological perspective provides a way to conceptualize these processes as ‘substantive and theoretical[ly] significant’ (p. 626, Bronfenbrenner, 1995). It is these transactions that drive development and these transactions that are both affected by characteristics of the child and of the context in which these transactions occur.