Online tasks for measuring infants’ social interaction preferences

• In Event: Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Investigating infants’ motivation to engage with others and their preference for specific social partners is essential for understanding the origins of social affiliation, moral evaluation, and social learning. Preferential reaching tasks are commonly used for this purpose: the infant is allowed to reach toward one of two social partners and their choice is considered to reflect their social preference. One task constraint is the impoverished, binary nature of the outcome: it does not capture infants’ decision-making processes or the strength of their preferences. A second is that reaching and grasping are not behaviors typical of or specific to the social domain: infants often interact with social partners at a distance, and with physical targets of exploration via reaching and grasping. A third is that preferential reaching cannot be used in online research that avoids health risks while increasing sample size and diversity. The current research aims to develop online tasks for assessing infants’ social preferences that overcome these drawbacks.
Study 1 will assess the potential for four novel tasks to serve as measures of infants’ motivation to interact with social partners. Thirty 14-to-24-month-old infants will participate over Zoom. First, infants will listen to a child-directed song while the experimenter alternately looks directly at the participant or averts her gaze; we will measure the participant’s relative preference for direct eye contact with the experimenter. Second, they will listen to another child-directed song while the experimenter claps and encourages the participant to clap; we will measure the participant’s clapping. Third, the experimenter will describe an object they wish to find, which will be visible in the background; we will measure participant’s attempts to help the experimenter find it via pointing or vocalization. Fourth, the experimenter will demonstrate a novel causal interaction with a toy that can be performed remotely (e.g. you touch your nose, a toy plays); we will measure the participant’s attempt to copy the mechanism. For the second, third, and fourth tasks, we will measure presence or absence of the target behavior, latency to first target behavior, and total repetitions of the target behaviors.
Tasks that elicit target behaviors from the majority of Study 1 participants will be tested in a second study that examines the influence of the experimenter’s prior pro- and antisocial behavior on infants’ social engagement. Sixty 14-to-24-month-old infants will first watch a video of the experimenter either helping or hindering another actor. Then the experimenter, blind to which video the infant saw, will attempt to engage the infant in some or all of the tasks from the first study. We hypothesize that infants will prefer agents who are helpful and will be more likely to imitate, learn from, and help them over hinderers. Strong candidates for online social preference measures will be ones that elicit variable levels of social engagement at baseline, and that show sensitivity to the perceived prosociality of infants’ prospective social partner. We anticipate that Study 1 will be completed by the conference date and will report preliminary data for Study 2.

Authors

• Paloma Iniguez, University of California - San Diego
  Presenting Author

• Alexis Sierra Smith-Flores, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lindsey Powell, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author