Poster #71 - Infants’ evaluation of abstractly depicted comforting behavior

• In Event: Poster Session 19

Abstract

A large body of evidence suggests that infants can evaluate pro-social behavior in third-party interactions. One form of pro-social behavior however, namely comforting someone, received much less attention. The few existing studies paint a mixed picture about the understanding of comforting behavior. While expectations for comforting behavior in third-party interactions have been shown to emerge universally as early as 4 months (Jin et al, 2018), individual differences of such expectations have also been identified in older infants (Johnson et al, 2007; Biro et al, 2015). The current study, using a manual choice paradigm, examined whether 12-month-old infants, after having watched animated abstract characters comfort or ignore a third party in distress, would show a preference for the comforting character. In addition, we investigated the role of animacy cues and infants’ self-distress in evaluating comforting behavior.
Infants were presented with two types of animations in which two abstract figures ("parent" and "baby") got separated and the baby figure started to cry. The parent figure then either returned (Comforting) or moved further away (Ignoring). The color and the shape of the parent figure were different for the two types of behavior, see Figure 1. In Experiment 1 (n = 64, 32 female), both figures had eyes, while in Experiment 2 (n = 64, 38 female) they did not. Each animation was repeated four times in alternating order. Following the animations, infants were presented with 3D objects of the parent figures. Infants touching, grabbing or pointing at one of the objects were counted as choice. Color, shape, order of animations and object placement were counterbalanced. Infants’ distress during the watching of the animations was coded using a 3-point scale based on vocalization and facial expressions.
In Experiment 1, 47 infants made a valid choice with 32 choosing the Comforting and 15 choosing the Ignoring character, p = .02. In Experiment 2, 51 infants made a valid choice with 21 choosing the Comforting and 30 choosing the ignoring character, p = .26, see Figure 2. The interaction between the two experiments in terms of the distribution of infants’ choice was also significant, χ2 = 7.13, Fisher's Exact Test p = .009, thus infants only in Experiment 1 were more likely to choose the comforting character. Infants’ distress ratings did not contribute to the distribution of the choices in either experiment , B <= -.54, SE <= .93, Wald <= .34, p >= .59.
We concluded that infants by 12 months of age prefer to see comforting behavior when someone else is in distress and that infants’ own self-distress did not prevent them to evaluate the behavior of the characters. A lack of preference in Experiment 2 could be either explained by the necessity of the presence of human surface feature to categorize the abstract characters as animate entities, or by the attention enhancing effect of eyes to process the observed interactions and connect 2D images to 3D objects. Our findings support the idea of an early presence of “moral sense” in infancy.

Author

• Szilvia Biro
  Presenting Author