Poster #116 - Poodles to Pointers: Infants From Families With Dogs Show Enhanced Communicative Development

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Understanding social-communicative intent, by following a point or gaze, is a key early milestone. It underlies later joint attention, is critical for building understanding between infants and adults, and presages language development (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2008; 2014; Carpenter, Nagell, Tomasello, Butterworth, & Moore, 1998). It is unclear what experiences boost earliest point and gaze understanding. We may anticipate witnessing point/gaze exchanges or dynamically tracking objects could help, but what circumstances might effectively promote these experiences for infants? Inter-species siblings, family pet dogs, likely support both. Dogs follow human social point and gaze cues (Hare & Tomasello, 2008) and provide engaging, unpredictably-moving visual objects to track. Having a dog as part of the family benefits child and adult social skills (Knight & Edwards, 2008), but do dogs also boost earliest social-communicative understanding? Fifty two of a planned 100 infants between the ages of 2.5 and 6.5 months participated in up to 7 of each point and gaze trials. In each trial, a researcher attracted the infant’s attention, pointed or gazed at a toy for 7 seconds, and then lowered their head for 5 seconds (per Scaife & Bruner, 1974 and D’Entremont, 2000). Preliminary data from video recordings of 33 (13 female) infants, 11 with dogs (M = 153 days old) and 21 without dogs (M = 143 days old), who contributed at least 3 point or gaze trials has been coded for looking behaviour by researchers blind to the point/gaze cue. Since the question is whether infants with pets are more likely to be able to follow a point or gaze cue, infants were considered to be able to follow a point or gaze cue if they successfully looked to the correct toy on at least two thirds of trials. The success rate of infants without pets was consistent with previous reports (e.g., 30- 38.5% in Scaife & Bruner, 1974): 42% followed a point (n = 19) and 30% a gaze (n = 20; see Figure 1). The success rate of infants with pets was nearly 20% higher (60%, n = 9) for point and double (60%, n = 10) for gaze following. Because this difference could not be statistically tested due to the limited size of the of control group, we analyzed the data parametrically using percent correct trials. With this analysis, infants with pets were statistically more likely to follow a point cue (M = 80.74%, SD = 19.76) than were infants without pets (M = 60.53%, SD = 20.82; t(26)=2.44, p=.022); there was no significant difference in gaze following between infants with (M = 50.50%, SD = 37.05) and without pets (M = 57.83%, SD = 17.36; t(28)=0.75, p = .462; see Figure 2). This is the earliest evidence of dogs enhancing our lives by bolstering social-communicative development in infancy.

Authors

• Nicole A Sugden, University of British Columbia
  Presenting Author

• Mary Zhao, University of British Columbia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Janet F. Werker, University of British Columbia
  Non-Presenting Author