Keeping Track of Infants’ Mental States: Development of the Mental-Event Segmentation Task

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Introduction. Maternal sensitive-responsiveness is supported by the capacity to mentalize about the infant, that is, to understand the mental states (MS) underlying the infant’s cues (e.g., Meins, 2013). Recently, working memory (WM) updating, the ability to keep track of goal-relevant information, has been associated with mothers’ appropriate references to the infant’s MS during real-time interactions (Yatziv et al., 2018). Yet, the mechanism by which WM is implicated in real-time mentalization remains unclear. According to Event-Segmentation Theory (e.g., Zacks, 2019), to make sense of their environment, people tend to parse what is happening into meaningful events; WM is engaged in maintaining “event models,” and updating occurs at boundaries between events. We suggest that event-segmentation facilitates a parent’s ability to monitor changes in MS, an ability we term “mental-event segmentation.”

Aims. The aim of this study was to develop a measure that would enable a refined examination of the mechanisms by which WM updating contributes to real-time mentalization about infants’ minds, focusing on event-segmentation based on MS during online viewing of infants– the mental-event segmentation task (MEST).

Methods. 190 female students (Mean age=23.78, age-range=20-32, 57.5% from psychology-related fields) completed two segmentation tasks. First, they completed the standard event-segmentation task (EST; Zacks et al., 2001), in which they viewed movies of adult actors performing every-day activities and were asked to press a key whenever one meaningful action had ended and another had begun. Afterwards, participants watched three additional movies, each presenting an infant playing; one group performed the same task (MEST-General condition; N = 93), whereas the other was given a brief explanation about MS and was asked to segment based on changes in mental-state (MEST-Mental condition). Participants verbally explained their key-presses, and explanations were coded as mental or behavioral (Meins & Fernyhough, 2015). Additional 15 developmental clinicians working in Soroka Medical Center’s preschool clinics (13 female, 13 parents, Mean age=42.27) completed the MEST-Mental task.

Results. 87% of explanations on the MEST-Mental condition referred to MS, indicating that participants understood the instructions. To examine infants’ mental-event structure, group performance was examined by calculating “norms”: number of participants who identified an event boundary at each 1-second bin (Figure 1A). Corresponding with the standard EST’s structure (Figure 1B), participants tended to generally agree on the position of event boundaries. Correlations between MEST norms indicated that the two conditions tap into only-partially overlapping events (Table 1). Developmental clinicians’ performance was more strongly related to MEST-Mental than MEST-general conditions (Zs > 2.31, ps < .021), supporting the validity of assessing group norms concerning MS. Finally, individual differences in segmentation abilities were computed based on each participant’s agreement with the norm (Table 1; Sargent et al., 2013). Individual differences in the tasks were significantly correlated (Table 1), indicating that the general ability to segmentation events is related to detection of changes in infants’ MS and actions.

Discussion. The MEST provides promising new avenues for studying how parents mentalize and keep track of changes in infants’ MS in real-time. Future analyses will include mentalization and standard WM updating measures.

Authors

• Tal Yatziv, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Michal Levy, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
  Non-Presenting Author

• Naama Atzaba-Poria, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yoav Kessler, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
  Non-Presenting Author