Contingency Effects of People and Objects on Subsequent Cognitive Functioning in Three‐month‐old Infants

Abstract

AbstractThree month‐old infants' responses to persons and objects who interacted with the infant at two levels of contingency were contrasted in two experiments. In experiment 1, contingent responding of people and objects was controlled. In experiment 2, the faciallvocal dynamics were controlled as well as contingent responding. In both experiments, contingent interaction had different effects on infants depending on whether the “actor” was a person or an object. In addition, the contingency and personlobject variables influenced infants' states of attention to a nonsocial stimulus on subsequent transfer tasks. Specifically, infants who experienced contingent interactions with people exhibited positive affect and exposed themselves to subsequent higher levels of stimulation than infants who experienced noncontingent interactions with people. These infants exhibited negative affective states and exposed themselves to very low levels of subsequent stimulation. In contrast, infants who experienced contingent and noncontingent interactions with objects did not show such variation in emotional expressions. Instead they produced primarily neutral facial expressions in all conditions and did not show very high nor very low levels of interest for the multi‐modal stimulus on the subsequent transfer tasks. The discussion centers on the mechanism that allow infants to discriminate between contingencies provided by people and objects and that drive the results obtained on the transfer tasks.