Poster #190 - Caregivers’ Touch and Infant Attention to Faces

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Even though touch is one of the earliest senses to emerge (Marx & Nagy, 2015), the mechanisms through which it can affect various aspects of infant development remain largely understudied. Specifically, the communicative role of touch has not been assessed to the same extent as the roles of gaze or voice, although evidence exists that touch may function as a social cue (Gliga, Farroni, & Cascio, 2018). For example, human 4-month-old infants, learned the identity of faces with averted gaze only when provided with gentle stroking , but not without the stimulation (Della Longa, Gliga, & Farroni, 2017). There is suggestive evidence that the effect touch has on social attention is mediated by hormonal changes. Experiencing touch leads to a release of oxytocin (Vittner et al., 2017) and decrease in cortisol, in premature babies (Gitau et al., 2002). The way in which infants direct their attention towards faces has been found to be associated with salivary oxytocin (Nishizato, Fujisawa, Kosaka, & Tomoda, 2017),
The aim of our study is to investigate whether infant attention towards faces is related to the amount of touch provided by their caregivers, and whether this association is mediated by changes in oxytocin and cortisol levels following caregiver-infant interaction. Two groups of infants, aged 6 – 8 months (n = 14) and 11 – 13 months (n = 14) have been filmed during 30-minutes-long periods of parent-child interaction, which was followed by an eye-tracking session employing the face pop-out task (Gliga, Elsabbagh, Andravizou, & Johnson, 2009). Saliva samples for cortisol and oxytocin assays were collected right before and immediately after the period of interaction. We hypothesize that the amount of touch received by the infants, as coded from the videos, is positively correlated with an increase in salivary oxytocin and a decrease in salivary cortisol following parent-child interaction, and with the amount of time spent looking at faces during presentation of a complex visual array containing faces among multiple visual objects.
Currently, data collection continues (target sample is n = 50 for each age group) and the videos of parent-child interactions are being coded.

Authors

• Alicja Brzozowska, Birkbeck College, University of London
  Presenting Author

• Frank Wiesemann, Procter & Gamble, Sulzbacher Strasse 40-50, 66824 Schwalbach am Taunus
  Non-Presenting Author

• Teodora Gliga, University of East Anglia, Norwich
  Non-Presenting Author

• Matthew R. Longo, Birkbeck, University of London
  Non-Presenting Author

• Denis Mareschal, Birkbeck, University of London
  Non-Presenting Author