Fausey, C. 1 , Jayaraman, S. 2 & Smith, L. 2
1 University of Oregon
2 Indiana University
Infants encounter the contents of their world through everyday activities like eating, dressing, and playing. This daily rhythm structures the content, duration, and order of sampled input, but we know almost nothing about it. Here, we report on patterns of stability and change in everyday activities throughout the first two years of life. Using time-sampling methodology, parents indicated what their infant was doing at one moment each half-hour throughout a 24-hour day (N = 105, distributed evenly across weekdays and ages 3-24 months). They selected one of these activities: sleep, eat, dress/bathe, play, read, media, in vehicle, group play, outside, public, other. Data suggest that over the first two years, the total daily experience of any given activity is fairly stable but the cycle of activities throughout the day changes. Frequent activity switches characterize the daily rhythm of the youngest infants, while toddlers experience longer bouts of sustained activity. The changing daily rhythm may guide pathways of attention and learning by constraining contexts for objects and their names to repeat during episodes of early experience. This rhythm may be crucial to developmental process by determining how infants sample the information in the world and connect experiences to each other.