Approving infant-directed messages enhance gaze cueing in six-month-old infants

• In Event: 3-127 - Gaze Following in Infancy: Contextual Influences and Developmental Implications

Integrative Statement

Infants rely on social cues like emotion and eye gaze to learn about their complex world. Caregivers convey emotion via infant-directed (ID) messages, which, compared to adult-directed (AD) messages, involve exaggerated facial and vocal expressions (Fernald, et al., 1989). Categories of ID messages with unique facial features include approving, comforting and prohibiting messages (Shepard, Spence, & Sasson, 2012). By 6 months, infants discriminate these ID categories (Spence & Moore, 2003) and differentially scan ID faces.

Previous research examining the effects of facial emotion on infants’ sensitivity to gaze cues found a gaze cueing effect, indicated by faster and longer looks to the gaze-cued target, when infants viewed static images of happy, but not angry or fearful, faces (Niedźwiecka & Tomalski, 2015). However, it is unknown how the exaggerated facial emotion of dynamic ID messages influences infants’ responses to gaze cues. The present study examined infants’ face scanning during dynamic emotional ID and AD messages and their subsequent gaze cueing responses.

Forty Caucasian 6-month-old infants (N=40, 21 females) completed a gaze cueing task in the context of ID and AD messages (Figure 1). We used a remote eye tracker to record eye movements throughout the task. Infants viewed a silent video of a Caucasian female delivering an ID approving, comforting, prohibiting or AD neutral message. The speech was muted to isolate the effects of dynamic facial emotions. The speaker next looked forward with a neutral expression to simulate eye contact with the infant and then gazed left or right. The speaker then disappeared and bilateral targets appeared in the periphery, with one target in the gaze-cued location and the second target in the opposite, uncued location. Infants completed 32 trials with the ID/AD message conditions presented in random order.

Analyses focused on a) overall sensitivity to the speaker’s gaze cue, indexed by looking time to cued vs. uncued targets, and b) the relation between looking time to the eyes during the ID/AD message and sensitivity to gaze cues across the four message conditions. Infants showed increased looking to the cued compared to uncued target (t(39)=2.64, p=.012) following approving messages only (Figure 2a). Infants also looked longer at the cued target following approving compared to comforting messages (t(39)=2.28, p=.028). Furthermore, for the approving condition only, infants who looked longer at the eyes compared to the mouth during the emotional ID/AD message also looked longer at the cued relative to uncued targets (r=0.44, p=.005; Figure 2b), suggesting that the observed gaze cueing effect in the context of approving messages is related to infants’ attention to the eyes.

These results suggest that 6-month-old infants’ sensitivity to gaze cues is influenced by dynamic facial emotion during ID/AD messages. Infants displayed a gaze cueing effect in the context of approving messages only. This gaze cueing effect may be influenced by attention to the eyes, as infants who looked longer at approving eyes were more sensitive to approving gaze cues. The present findings may have implications for learning from social cues in the context of infant-directed interactions.

Authors

• Claire Frances Noonan, Tulane University
  Presenting Author

• Julie Markant, Tulane University
  Non-Presenting Author