Ten Lessons About Infants’ Everyday Experiences
Abstract
Audio recorders, accelerometers, and cameras that infants wear throughout their everyday lives capture the experiences that are available to shape development. Using sensors to capture behaviors in natural settings can reveal patterns within the everyday hubbub that are unknowable using methods that capture shorter, more isolated, or more planned slices of behavior. Here, we review 10 lessons learned from recent endeavors in which researchers neither designed nor participated in infants’ experiences and instead quantified patterns that arose within infants’ own spontaneously arising everyday experiences. The striking heterogeneity of experiences—the fact that there is no meaningfully “representative” hour of a day, instance of a category, interaction context, or infant—inspires next steps in theory and practice that embrace the complex, dynamic, and multiple pathways of human development.
