Long Term Consequences of Joint Parent-Infant Play: Social Partners Train Infant’s Regulation of Sustained Attention

• In Event: 3-153 - Sustained Attention in Early Development

Integrative Statement

This study examines the role of social partners for the development of sustained attention (SA) by testing the long-term consequences of parent-infant joint play. The approach relates to Paper 4 as it aims to explain mechanisms of developmental change for infant’s visual attention. This paper also extends Paper 3, which found, as Yu & Smith (2016) did, a strong association between the duration of infant attention to an object and parent’s engagement with that object. One hypothesis is that in-the-moment parental extension of SA trains infant’s internal self-regulation of attention. If correct, then parents that optimally engage and extend infant attention in-the-moment should have children that later show SA in a context without the parent. Our study tests this hypothesis.
Method. The study consisted of a Joint play session at 15-months and Solo play session nine months later. At 15-months (M=16.46, SD=1.49) twenty-eight infants engaged in Joint play with the parent for six minutes. We coded participant’s eye-gaze using head-mounted eye-trackers, as well as parent speech and holding. Parent engagement during an infant look was defined when the parent looked at the infant-attended object, touched it and talked. Infant looks classified as Social SA represented moments hypothesized as ideal for training by the parent because they had substantial parental engagement and were sustained (longer than 3-seconds like Yu & Smith, 2016). We measured two other infant looks categories because they had one of the two hypothesized properties that determine future SA (SA and parent engagement) and therefore should not predict future SA: Solo SA were sustained looks but without parent’s engagement while Social Non-SA were looks with parent’s engagement that were not sustained. At 24-months (M=24.41, SD=0.74) the infants explored toys alone during Solo play and Solo-SA was measured for each infant as the count of looks that were at least 3-seconds-long, divided by total number of that infant’s looks (Table 1).
Results. At 24-months some infants showed Solo-SA in 0.00 of all of their looks while some in 0.44. We correlated Solo-SA at 24-months with Social SA, Solo SA and Social Non-SA at 15-months (Figure 1) to investigate the relevant type of infant look, or experience, which predicted future Solo-SA. As expected, the degree to which parents engaged and extended infant attention (Social SA) at 15-months was positively correlated with Solo-SA at 24-months, r=0.57, p=0.001. The degree to which infants showed Solo SA, or SA without parent’s engagement, was not correlated with future Solo-SA (r= -0.09, p=0.65). Finally, the degree to which parents engaged but did not extend infant attention (Social Non-SA) was not significantly correlated (r=0.28, p=0.14).
Discussion. The results showed that future SA was predicted exclusively by the degree to which parents provided multimodal engagement that extended infant attention at 15-months. Neither the infant’s ability to sustain attention alone nor the degree to which the parent engaged but did not extend, were reliable predictors of future SA. These results suggest the parents’ ability to extend SA during play may be implicated in the development of SA.

Authors

• Catalina Suarez-Rivera, Indiana University
  Presenting Author

• Linda B Smith, Indiana University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chen Yu, Indiana University
  Non-Presenting Author