Natural Behavior

Natural Behavior, Volume 66 highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters written by an international board of authors.

There is a long history of studying natural behavior in science. In 1872, Charles Darwin documented his observations on the development of his children in words, which was published in an article titled “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant.” Traditionally, observational studies like this had been viewed as insightful but also criticized as not objective and quantitative. More recently, building on advanced computation, the contemporary approaches to studying natural behavior in the real world delivered quantitative results. New sensing and wearable technologies allow researchers to collect high-density data in everyday contexts. With technological advances, we can scale up and obtain quantitative results from real-world data. This volume contains a collection of papers on studying natural behavior of child development. Those papers aim at understanding and predicting behavior and cognition as it occurs within complex real-world situations. Compared with findings from laboratories, the results derived from natural behavior are remarkably reliable, which provides an answer to the reproducibility crisis in science. Moreover, the findings based on natural behavior can be directly applied to the real world, especially in the health and education domains.

• Latest research on understanding development based on children’s natural behavior, rather than behavior based on short-term visits in laboratory settings
• New methods for studying and analyzing children’s natural behavior across short and extended time scales
• Cross-cutting research across different domains (e.g., language, cognition, interpersonal coordination), linked by a focus on natural behavior

Professor Jeffrey J. Lockman got his Ph.D at the University of Minnesota. His research interests center on perception-action and cognitive development. In his recent work, he has been studying the development of tool use in children and how it might be related to the object manipulation skills of infants. Additionally, he has been conducting work on spatial cognition in children, focusing on how children code the location of objects and object features.

Chen Yu is the Charles and Sarah Seay Regents Professor of the Department of Psychology, Central of Perceptual Systems, and Institute of Neural Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the Association of Psychological Science. He received the Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award from the American Psychological Foundation, the David Marr Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and the ICIS Early Distinguished Contribution Award. He has published over 200 articles with several best paper awards from IEEE ICDL, Cognitive Science, and CVPR.