We may be taught not to judge a book by its cover, but we certainly should judge it by its contents, a recent study has revealed.
The study, published in the journal Child Development, found that when parents read children aged six months books with faces and objects that were individually named, the little ones tended to learn more.
As well, kids who read these more specific books also generalised what they learned to new situations and exhibited more specialised brain responses.
The research team used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the infants' brain responses to different images, through a cap-like net of 128 sensors on their heads.
By measuring their neural responses to these images, the scientists could determine whether or not the children could tell the difference between the characters shown to them.
The parents and their children were split into three different groups, with the first group of mums and dads reading their kids storybooks with six individually named characters that they'd never seen before.
The second group had the same book, but instead of individual names, the six characters were all labelled under a singular group term. The final control group didn't read anything special for the study.
The three groups returned three months later, and only the babies in the first group with the individually named characters showed increased attention compared to their initial visit.
These infants also had the ability to distinguish between the different characters, an effect that the other two groups did not exhibit.
One of the study's authors, Lisa S. Scott, noted in The Washington Post, "These findings suggest that very young infants are able to use labels to learn about the world around them and that shared book-reading is an effective tool for supporting development in the first year of life."
While, yes, six to nine months seems a bit young to be so concerned about learning, a 2015 study suggests that individual-level training during that time is associated with enhanced process-specific learning around age four.
What do you think, mums? Anyone feel like a trip to the bookstore all of a sudden?
