Exploring the Emergence of Side Biases and Familiarity–Novelty Preferences from the Real‐Time Dynamics of Infant Looking

Abstract

This study examined how look dynamics contribute to infants' emerging novelty preferences. Time-series analyses were used to study the temporal nature of looking displayed by 3-to 5-month-old infants during a serial paired-comparison task. Evidence was found only for short-term stability: Novelty preferences and side biases were not stable from one visit to the next, but looking was consistent from one moment to the next producing stability within trials and temporarily across trials leading to the formation of behavioral runs. Persistence in looking left or right across multiple trials did not change from one visit to the next, but persistence in looking at familiar stimuli declined with age. By Visit 3, familiarity runs occurred less often than did novelty runs. Frequent but highly variable runs, including surprisingly late familiarity preferences, suggest that overall side biases and novelty preferences found during visual preference tasks are emergent phenomena affected by moment-to-moment changes in looking. Studies by Fantz (1958, 1964 investigating visual preferences during the first 6 months of life revolutionized the study of infant behavior. Visual discrimination skills are now widely studied within the field. For example, looking behavior was a dependent variable in 61 of the 90 empirical articles published in Infancy from 2010 through 2012 using human infants as Correspondence should be sent to Donna Fisher-Thompson,

Temporal Dependency and the Structure of Early Looking

“…However, there is a crucial distinction between temporal dependency—associations between the durations of successive actions—and autocorrelation. Autocorrelation refers to the association between behavior at a fixed interval in time (e.g., 1 second), t , and behavior at a previous interval, t-1 [13,53,54]. By contrast, temporal dependency involves associations between the durations of consecutive events such as looks and trials.…”

“…Time-series analyses, which use a specific interval as a unit of analysis, also provide evidence for the temporal structuring of looking. Fisher-Thompson [13] found that successive intervals (ranging from .25 to 10.0 seconds) of gazing in a two-screen task to one side or another show autocorrelation, which contributes to short-term side-bias. However, these investigations did not examine associations between the durations of successive infant-initiated looks.…”

An Overview of Humor

“…Parents wishing to show off their infant's infectious laugh know this frustration; what was hysterically funny to their infant yesterday may barely elicit a response today. Infants prefer novelty (Fisher-Thompson 2014), and it should be no surprise that this applies to their comedic taste as well.…”

Humor in Infants

“…Infants prefer novelty (Fisher-Thompson 2014), and it should be no surprise that this applies to their comedic taste as well. Researchers and parents who volunteer for such studies try to avoid these problems by planning around infants' eating and sleeping schedules.…”