Infants' social looking toward mothers and strangers

Abstract

This study investigated infant social looking in a social referencing procedure with mothers and strangers. Sixty-one infants and their mothers participated when the infants were 18 and 24 months old. The frequency and latency of looking toward each adult when the baby encountered remotecontrolled ambiguous toys were measured. Mothers and strangers (female experimenters) expressed positive or negative emotional responses whenever children looked toward them. Results indicated that older infants looked more often and faster, especially toward strangers. Both age groups tended to look to the strangers more frequently than to mothers. The pattern of looking toward caregivers over time differed from looking toward strangers in both age groups. These results indicate that nonattachment figures may be preferred targets of referencing in certain situations. It is also implied that older infants' looks to adults might differ from those of their younger counterparts in a number of ways.

Uncertainty matters: impact of stimulus ambiguity on infant social referencing

“…Referential looks are based in infants' looking behaviour towards adults when they need to understand situations, and are associated with infants' motivations to be actively involved in social communication (Stenberg, 2003;Walden & Kim, 2005). Most studies measured referential looks by calculating the number of infant's social looks at adults (e.g.…”

“…Some researchers examined the latency of looks (how fast infants make an eye contact with adults; e.g. Walden & Kim, 2005) or the duration of looks (how long infants maintain the eye-contact with adults; e.g. Mumme et al, 1996).…”

Developmental Changes of Referential Looks in 7-and 9-Month-Olds: A Transition From Dyadic to Proto-Referential Looks

“…They found that stranger had lesser effect on the infant's behavior than their own mother. A more recent study and the only study, which used two simultaneous referees (mother and stranger) was Walden and Kim (2005). They tested infants aged 18 and 24 months for their social referencing behavior in terms of their frequency of looks given to each referee and found that the older infants preferred more frequently to the stranger than their mother.…”

“…It is not too unreasonable to think that infants much younger than those in Walden and Kim (2005) are able to select referee, given the recent studies on young infants' ability to monitor and sensitivity towards their social partner's state, which seems to emerge during the latter half of the first year of life. For instance, Striano and Rochat (1999a) demonstrated evidence for a gradual emergence of referential looking behavior alternating between an object and a person.…”

“…In order to attempt to see changes in motives behind the looking behavior, two possible referees (mother and familiarized stranger) were used. As Walden and Kim (2005) mentioned the possibility of the novelty effect of the stranger referee may have been attributable to the high frequency of looks to the stranger referee, we made the stranger referee in our experiment well familiarized to the infant before this part of the experiment. In fact, the stranger referee was the experimenter in charge of a number of other experimental tasks lasting over 30 minutes before this part of the experiment, also the entry of the stimuli (novel stranger) for this experiment was controlled by the experimenter's raising hand.…”