Infant Looking Behavior in Ambiguous Situations: Social Referencing or Attachment Behavior?

Abstract

Is infant looking behavior in ambiguous situations best described in terms of information seeking (social referencing) or as attachment behavior? Twelve-month-old infants were assigned to 1 of 2 conditions (Study 1); each infant's mother provided positive information about an ambiguous toy and an experimenter provided positive information. In Study 2, 12-month-old infants were assigned to l of 3 conditions: mother provided positive information about the toy, mother was inattentive, or mother provided negative information; the experimenter was inattentive. The infants preferred to look at the experimenter in almost all conditions and they regulated their behavior in accordance with information obtained from the experimenter. None of the studies lends support for an explanation in terms of behaviors deriving from the attachment system, and they raise questions concerning social referencing interpretations of infants' looking behavior. Other alternatives for explaining infant looking behavior in social referencing situations (e.g., associative learning) are discussed. The research reported here attempts to contribute to an understanding of processes involved in infants' looking behavior in ambiguous situations. Such behavior can be interpreted from different perspectives. For instance, infant looks at another person in an ambiguous situation can be interpreted as an expression ofCorrespondence should be addressed to

Selective imitation in 6-month-olds: The role of the social and physical context

“…Instead, infants might take into account both the physical and social context of a situation when learning new information (e.g., Stenberg, 2009;Stenberg & Hagekull, 2007). For example, when encountering an ambiguous situation in an unfamiliar environment, 12-month-old infants are prone to paying attention to an unfamiliar adult rather than their own mother (Stenberg & Hagekull, 2007), suggesting they might perceive an unfamiliar person as a particularly valuable source of information in a novel environment. It is unknown whether younger infants might already have some basic assumptions about certain models being particularly useful or trustworthy as teachers in certain settings.…”

“…Specifically, we predicted that infants would be most likely to copy the action of a model who they might expect to provide useful information in a particular physical context (Stenberg & Hagekull, 2007) i.e., a familiar model in a familiar context and an unfamiliar model in an unfamiliar context.…”

The role of demonstrator familiarity and language cues on infant imitation from television

“…example, learn what objects in the room might be interesting to attend to (e.g., D'Entremont, Hains, & Muir, 1997), safe to approach (e.g., Stenberg & Hagekull, 2007) and what actions could be performed with those objects (e.g., Meltzoff, 1988;Barr, Dowden & Hayne, 1996). In their second year of life, infants learn two to three novel behaviours per day through simply watching and reproducing the actions of people around them .…”

Social referencing in 10-month-old infants

“…Older infants' looking behaviour is expected to be more information-seeking oriented (Kutsuki et al, 2007;Striano, Vaish, & Benigno, 2006;Walden & Kim, 2005), and at 1 year infants are able to utilize referential cues in the behaviours of others and use that information to guide their behaviour toward novel objects (Moses et al, 2001). At the same age, infants prefer to look at the experimenter over the parent in social referencing experiments, and use information provided by the experimenter when handling an ambiguous object (e.g., Stenberg & Hagekull, 2007). Such looking preference has been suggested to reflect early signs of infants' growing awareness that people can be more or less informative in a certain setting (an "expertise effect", Feinman et al, 1992).…”