My research investigates the meaning-making process in early childhood, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. One strand highlights the importance of cultural relevance in conducting research with diverse communities. Another strand examines how context shifts the learning process for babies and young children, with a focus on parent-child communication and technology use.
Young children’s use of new technologies
We study children’s use of interactive technologies to see how it affects communication, learning, and development. For example, in an interdisciplinary project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF 1617253), we studied how interactive technologies facilitated cleft speech therapy at home. This project took the participatory design approach and drew on our research findings in cognitive development while taking into account individual differences and social interactivity in children’s use of technology. Another project examines children’s experience with and parental beliefs about the Internet of Things (IoT), that is, the devices that are connected to the internet. This project seeks to raise the awareness of gaps between children’s lived experiences with IoT and industry’s security measures to inform best practices and policymaking.
This line of research also features our investigation of how children navigate screen-media use with their caregivers, peers, and families. For example, we showed that toddlers have a tendency to treat device use as a social activity, and this tendency can alleviate negative impacts of technology use on their cognitive functioning. Furthermore, the design of an app can affect parental talk with children as they play the app together, and it also influences children’s spatial reasoning. Finally, the context of screen-media activity matters for how parents navigate the device use with their young children.
The role of action experience in learning
Both observational and hands-on experiences are crucial for learning. This line of research examines the processes by which young children learn about patterns and rules as they observe others perform various actions and as they themselves explore the world. Can babies extract an abstract rule after watching just a few examples? Do action experience and visual observation affect early learning in the same way? Different cultural communities may vary in the kind of action experience provided to their young children. In multiple reports, we document cultural differences and similarities in ways that caregivers foster strengths for learning in babies and young children before they enter school. These reports clarify the implications on equitable learning in and out of school.
Our lab is part of the launch group of the nation-wide collaborative project, Play and Learning Across a Year (PLAY). The goal of the PLAY project is to establish a model system for a synergistic approach to developmental science that enables a communal means of collecting and coding naturalistic data.
Social cognition & theory of mind
Psychological knowledge constitutes an important domain of human cognition; this project explores early understanding about people. How do young children interpret others’ actions? Do they impute in others preference, desire, or belief? For example, one of our projects showed that 14-month-old babies noticed a person’s preference for a type of objects after watching just three instances in which the person made her choices. Furthermore, babies still notice the preference despite some inconsistency in the person’s behavior but the timing of inconsistency matters.
In this line of research, we are currently focusing on infants’ and young children’s sensitivity to communicative cues (such as facial expressions and verbal cues) to interpret others’ actions. Our work has converged to demonstrate the importance of contextual framing in social cognition, the construction of the context in which babies and young children navigate the meaning and purpose of the task at hand with other people. For example, in resource sharing, children are sensitive to the collaborative versus individualistic nature of the task; our sample of preschool-age children from White middle-class backgrounds share more readily when a task is framed as a collaboration with others.
Attention, memory, and representation
In this strand of research, we study how babies and young children go with the flow as they try to make sense of their observation of the world. We have shown that context shifts concept. For example, different spatial contexts often yield a profound shift of babies’ attention to different aspects of the world. This research addresses the questions of how babies and young children keep track of objects and events around them and what helps them direct their attention more efficiently.
Selected Publications
Lin, H., Lee, Y., Gross, I., & Wang, S. (2025). Social interaction in different contexts of screen-media activities: The case of Chinese-heritage children and caregivers in Taiwan. Journal of Children and Media.
Wang, S. (2025). Parental guidance fosters hands-on learning by infants in culturally different ways. Developmental Psychology, 61, 19-36.
Basch, S., & Wang, S. (2024). Causal learning by infants and young children: From computational theories to language practices. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Cognitive Science, 15(4), Article e1678.
Gross, I., & Wang, S. (2024). Exploring modalities and functions of toddlers’ social interaction during touchscreen play. Journal of Children and Media, 1-19.
Wang, S., & Basch, S. (2024). A cultural perspective of action-based learning by infants and young children. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 67, 164-199.
Antrilli, N. K., & Wang, S. (2023). Tangible and digital materials for spatial play: Exploring the effects on parental talk and children’s spatial reasoning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 54, 642-661.
Duh, S., Goldman, E. J., & Wang, S. (2023). The role of intentionality in infants’ prediction of helping and hindering. Journal of Cognition and Development, 24, 105-128.
Basch, S., Covarrubias, R., & Wang, S.-h. (2022). Minoritized students’ experiences with pandemic-era remote learning inform ways of expanding access. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology. Advanced online publication.
Wang, S., Lang, N., Bunch, G. C., Basch, S., McHugh, S. R., Huitzilopochtli, S., & Callanan, M. (2021). Dismantling persistent deficit narratives about the language and literacy of culturally and linguistically minoritized children and youth: Counter-possibilities. Frontiers in Education, 6, 1-19.
Zhang*, Y., Wang*, S., & Duh, S. (2021). Directive guidance as a cultural practice for learning in Chinese-heritage babies. Human Development, 65, 121-138. *These authors contributed equally to this work.