The current research landscape will be weighed in three panels of speakers:
Panel 1: Studying Digital Media and Cognitive Development During the COVID-19 Panel Discussion (Chair Heather Kirkorian)
Panel 2: Digital Media and Social Cognition Symposium (Chair Heather Kirkorian)
Panel 3: Emerging Technologies and Cognitive Development Symposium (Chair Koeun Choi)
Our first session, moderated by Dr. Heather Kirkorian, will address “Studying Digital Media and Cognitive Development During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” In this session, Drs. Rachel Barr and Jonathan Kominsky will each give a short presentation (10 minutes) about tools for remote data collection, followed by a general question and discussion period with workshop attendees (20 minutes). Dr. Barr will present the CAFE (Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure) toolkit to characterize household media use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Kominsky will present online developmental research tools and techniques that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic for remote data collection.
Our second session, chaired by Dr. Heather Kirkorian, will focus on “Screen Media and Cognitive Development.” Drs. Alex Bonus, Cassie Eng, and Martina Rau will each give a short presentation (10 minutes) about their research, followed by a question-and-answer period (15 minutes). The talks will examine children's learning from educational television (Conceptualizing fantasy media as preparation for future learning), e-books (Leveraging cognitive principles in multimedia learning to optimize e-books for children's attention and comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking), and adaptive technology (Adaptive technology support for learning with interactive visualizations in STEM), respectively.
Our final panel, chaired by Dr. Koeun Choi, will address “Emerging Technologies and Cognitive Development.” Drs. Judith Danovitch, Ying Xu, and Koeun Choi will each give a short presentation (10 minutes) about their research, followed by a question-and-answer period (15 minutes). The talks will examine children's responses to and interactions with internet search engines (What does Google know? Children’s thinking about the internet as an information source), conversational agents such as voice assistants (Socially interactive learning with conversational agents), and social robots (Child-robot musical theater for informal STEAM education), respectively.