Abstract
Infant looking patterns during interaction offer an early window into social and nonsocial engagement. Recent evidence indicates that infant looks exhibit temporal dependency—one look duration predicts the next look duration. It is unknown, however, whether temporal dependency emerges as infants structure their own looking or whether it is influenced by interaction. We examined whether a perturbation of social interaction affected temporal dependency. Using the Face-to-Face/Still-Face procedure, we compared temporal dependency during parental interaction (the Face-to-Face & Reunion episodes) to parental non-responsiveness (the Still-Face episode). Overall, the durations of successive infant looks were predictable; past behavior constrained current behavior. The duration of one look at the parent (Face Look) predicted the duration of the next Face Look. Likewise, the duration of a look at any place that was not the parent’s face (Away Look) predicted the duration of the next Away Look. The temporal dependency of Face Looks (social engagement) was unaffected by the Still-Face perturbation, but the temporal dependency of Away Looks (nonsocial engagement) declined during the Still-Face. Infant temporal structuring of engagement during social looking is not dependent on parental interaction while the disruption of interaction affects infants’ structuring of their own non-social engagement.
Highlights
Infant looking is used to investigate early engagement and attention in procedures such as the Face-to-Face/ Still-Face (FFSF)[1,2]
The current study addresses these gaps by employing a larger sample, centering within individual, and addressing the effects of parental interaction in an experimental protocol
We examined three central questions: (1) is the temporal dependency of Face Looks affected by the Still-Face; (2) is the temporal dependency of Away Looks affected by the Still-Face; and (3) are the overall levels of infants’ temporal dependency in Face Looks and Away Looks related, independent of their association at the level of looks? We hypothesized that both (1) Face Looks and (2) Away Looks would be disrupted in the Still-Face
Summary
Infant looking is used to investigate early engagement and attention in procedures such as the Face-to-Face/ Still-Face (FFSF)[1,2]. Temporal dependency involves associations between the durations of consecutive events such as looks at a target (see Fig. 1)[3], which are determined by the infant’s actions, rather than on fixed units of time. While both types of analysis focus on sequences, a temporal dependency approach is especially relevant to analyses of behaviors parameterized dichotomously (e.g., looking at and away from a social partner). Longer looks tended to follow longer looks, and shorter looks tended to follow shorter looks It was not clear whether this temporal dependency effect was due to the infants’ self-organization of their own looking behavior or to the scaffolding influence of interaction with the parent. The current study addresses these gaps by employing a larger sample, centering within individual, and addressing the effects of parental interaction in an experimental protocol
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