By Kelsey Bartlett
Inside a colorful office filled with toys and touchscreens, technology and early childhood learning collide.
Sitting on his mother’s lap, 3-year-old Alex pointed to a photo, smiling, as an AI voice played through the speakers.
He was listening to TaleMate, an interactive reading platform, and one of several recent projects led by the Cognitive Developmental Sciences (CoDeS) Lab at Virginia Tech. Directed by Koeun Choi, an associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science, the lab explores the role technology plays in children’s development, and its potential to support early learning.
Alex’s mother, Rose Wesche, said her son is always excited for new opportunities – especially those that involve a screen.
“As his parent, it's hard to know how to curate his interactions with technology so they help his cognitive development,” said Wesche, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science. “I'm grateful for the work that Dr. Choi and her team are doing, which will help parents and kids navigate our technological world.”
Choi, the team’s principal investigator, founded the lab in 2018 and leads an interdisciplinary team of graduate and undergraduate students. The lab is housed in Wallace Hall on campus, and the group regularly works with faculty in other departments. The group’s research spans a range of topics related to children and emerging technologies, including parent-child interaction.
Over the years, the group has used numerous technologies, including touchscreen tablets, video chats, voice assistants, and even social robots. Ultimately, Choi hopes their research will influence how technological tools are used and designed to support children’s cognitive development.
“I'm interested in how we use this technology, not to take away what children or parents can do, but how it can empower them in their own learning,” Choi said. “That's an important direction that we need to really think about.”
The TaleMate platform is designed to encourage early reading habits. Research shows that shared reading between children and caregivers plays a key role in a child’s development of vocabulary, comprehension, and critical thinking skills, Choi said. While traditional story time involves adults reading a book to children in a singular voice, the TaleMate platform uses AI voices to create playful and immersive reading experiences. The team plans to recruit about 70 children aged 4-6 for the study.
“Parent interaction is very important, and parents and teachers do a great job reading stories,” Choi said. “But research suggests that there are not many dramatic reading opportunities. We think that we can help by lifting that burden and instilling some fun and playfulness in the reading through AI technology.”
The platform also incorporates interactive questions for children and their caregivers to explore together and foster a sense of connection – something the group identified as a potential limitation of traditional audiobooks. For the study, the team selected a storybook designed to teach math skills to children. Participants read the book with and without TaleMate, allowing researchers to evaluate the platform’s impact on reading comprehension.
"These storybooks are getting children to home in on those math language terms, which are really important for their understanding of math later on,” said Caroline Hornburg, an associate professor of Human Development and Family Science who was also involved in the project.
Along with helping children develop important cognitive skills, the lab provides Virginia Tech students with real-world research experiences, said Hornburg, who directs the Learning and Development Lab at Virginia Tech.
“When students are learning to administer these measures in a standardized way, then that means that we can get reliable data, we can draw conclusions from that, and then make decisions about what works best,” Hornburg said.
Fatima Rehmatulla, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in human development, worked with parents to teach them how to use the platform and gauge feedback.
“This project in the lab, overall, has helped me with problem solving, working with different types of people, and other important skills that will be helpful in any career I go into,” she said.
Alex also participated in the lab’s interactive Cookie Monster-themed counting project for children ages 2-4. With the help of Sang Won Lee, associate professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Computer Science, the team developed a touchscreen cookie-counting game that incorporates an AI voice assistant. Lee worked to ensure the technology was “human centered and easy to use.” Voice navigation guides children through the activity, asking them to count how many cookies the iconic “Sesame Street” character has.
“It’s a pretty simple task and a very easy thing for adults to do, but it takes a while for children to learn, and they still make quite a bit of mistakes,” Choi said. “This is a very important foundation for children’s later academic achievement.”
One of the biggest takeaways from the project, Choi said, is that children’s counting abilities vary greatly depending on the child’s socioeconomic status and level of math anxiety.
“When we think about the socioeconomic gap, we actually see the reverse pattern regarding screen time,” Choi said. “Children from low-income or lower-educational family backgrounds spend way more time, sometimes up to two hours more, on screens than high income families.”
By incorporating counting into screen time, Choi hopes the platform will introduce foundational concepts that support long-term academic success. She also hopes to make the lab’s materials openly accessible to the public to reach a broader and more diverse audience.
“In general, they have enjoyed and embraced the technology like little explorers,” Choi said of the lab’s participants. “It’s important to note that parents were also excited about this new technology, particularly when they are intentionally designed to support children.”
The lab has received financial support from the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, and the Institute for Society, Culture and Environment at Virginia Tech. Recently, it received a grant from the Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood.