Spotlight on LEVANTE’s Leuphana Site: Understanding socio-communicative development through children’s eyes

Early life experiences crucially shape human development, particularly during the period from birth to preschool age. Perhaps one of the biggest paradoxes in developmental psychology is that there is only very limited data about authentic, unfiltered family life, let alone cross-cultural data that allows for comparing everyday experiences in different parts of the world. 

To address this research gap, the Department of Developmental Psychology founded the LüneLütten organisation, which translates to “Lüneburg’s Little Ones.” It serves as a platform for conducting developmental research at Leuphana University by connecting researchers with families, for example through recruiting children via kindergartens. In our studies, we equip children in their everyday life with a bodycam that captures what happens around them, including everyday situations like playing, laughing, conversations, and everything in between. With this approach we try to understand what challenges children face, how their interactions are shaped, and how different factors influence children’s development. 

To answer the mentioned research questions, two study procedures are planned. 

1. The first study assesses reasoning, spatial cognition, language, literacy, and social cognition using among others LEVANTE measures newly adapted to capture these constructs in children aged 3–5. We plan to begin with a piloting phase testing around 50 children, followed by an additional 90 children to reach the sample size needed for our analyses. All participants will be recruited through the LüneLütten.
2. The second study is a university-based project that we aim to connect with the LEVANTE findings. This data collection follows a multi-step procedure. At the age of 34–38 months, children participate in a naturalistic home recording session where the bodycam, integrated in a self-designed vest, will record an ordinary day. The goal is eight hours of video recordings per child with a minimum of two hours. For this study we aim for a sample of around 45 participants. Following the recording phase, we will test children’s understanding of pragmatic language, social cognition and language abilities with four different tests that are not part of the LEVANTE battery. 

The two studies are designed to complement each other. Forty-five of the children from the video recording study will also be part of the 90-child LEVANTE sample, allowing us to directly compare and combine the two datasets. The whole study is designed as a longitudinal project, meaning that the same children will be assessed at age three and again at age four to examine developmental trajectories.

All video recordings will be processed using automatic detection and classification models to extract information about social interactions, language environments, activities and objects. These models allow us to annotate the large amounts of video material efficiently and reliably. We built our system in collaboration with another LEVANTE site, the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary Anthropology. Here, a large corpus of data was collected from more than 100 children using the same recording setup. Importantly, this data was partly annotated by humans, allowing us to check the quality of our detection models. This close collaboration illustrates the potential of the LEVANTE network in pooling resources to achieve better outcomes.

We are pleased to be part of the LEVANTE research project, which provides a robust basis of high-quality measures that helps link everyday experiences to cognitive development. Together, we hope to share new findings with the broader research community and make developmental research more accessible and meaningful.