The Influence of Emotional Signals from Multiple Informants on Toddlers’ Visual Exploration

• In Event: Seeing is Believing: Infants' and Toddlers' Social Learning from Visual Cues

Abstract

Prior studies demonstrated the importance of emotional signals in guiding infants’ behaviors, such as learning and action reproduction (e.g., Patzeald et al., 2018; Ruba et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2018). Especially, emotional valences can modulate infants’ social behaviors effectively (Mumme & Fernald, 2003; Patzeald et al., 2018). Despite the converging evidence, prior research exclusively focused on how infants utilized emotional signals from a single informant over repeated encounter. In real-life scenarios, infants often interact with multiple informants who may express consistent or inconsistent emotions; Thus, it is unclear how infants integrate emotion from multiple informants and use it to guide their behaviors. The current study investigated how emotional cues from multiple informants biased toddlers’ visual exploration of novel objects.
The study recruited 44 toddlers between 12 to 24 months (28 females; 40 White, 1 Asian, and 3 Mixed- race). Participants first learned emotional feedback about a novel object via a series of videos. Each video depicted a Caucasian female looking at a partially occluded novel object with happy, sad, or neutral expressions. As shown in Figure 1, toddlers watched videos of 8 different informants: 4 exhibited emotional facial expressions (emotion block) to an object (emotion-related object), and the other 4 exhibited emotionally neutral facial expressions (neutral block) to another object (neutral- related object). After watching the videos, toddlers saw the two objects presented side-by-side for 4 5s-rials (the test phase). The display of the objects was to probe toddlers’ visual exploration of the objects through their looking preferences.
We conducted two experiments examining the impact of consistent and inconsistent emotional signals. The emotion consistency was achieved by manipulating the proportions of positive and negative emotions presented in the emotion block. Experiment 1 examined the effect of consistent emotional signals (100%Sad & 100%Happy); Experiment 2 showed inconsistent emotional signals (50%Happy + 50%Sad & 50%Sad + 50%Neutral). This study was conducted online, and looking preference was coded with Datavyu.
In Experiment 1, emotional feedback was consistent across informants, toddlers looked longer at the object associated with neutral expression over the object associated with sad expression (M = 59.61%, SD = 12.41%, One-sample t-test compared to the chance of 50%, p = .003). In the 100%Happy condition, participants showed no preference between the two objects (M = 46.17%, SD = 13.34%, One-sample t-test, p = .214, Figure 2A). These findings indicated that consistent sad emotional signals restricted toddlers’ visual exploration, while consistent happy signal did not impact their visual exploration.
In Experiment 2, where inconsistent emotional signals were provided, toddlers showed no preference between the emotion-related objects and neutral-related objects (ps > .23). However, compared with the consistent negative condition (100%Sad, Experiment 1), inconsistent emotional signals led to increased visual exploration toward emotion-related object (Independent-sample t-tests, ps < .01, Figure 2B).
These findings showed that toddlers’ visual exploration was not only affected by emotional valence (positive vs. negative) but also modulated by the consistency of the emotional feedback from multiple informants. The study suggested that mixed emotional signals could boost exploration behaviors in toddlers.

Authors

• Wei Fang, McMaster University
  Presenting Author

• Naomi Geller

• Selena Li

• Meg Lyu

• Ally Zhao

• Naiqi G Xiao, McMaster University