Maternal Contingent Responsiveness Longitudinally Predicts Infants’ Real-Time Neural Responses to Socially Contingent Events

• In Event: The Diversity of Social Contingency and its Contributions to Social and Communicative Development

Abstract

The ability to interact and communicate with social partners is central to adaptive human functioning. What factors contribute to the development of these crucial social and communicative skills? The present study tests the hypothesis that infants’ experience and detection of contingency within interactions—i.e., experiencing and detecting that a social partner’s behaviors are dependent upon and in response to the infant’s own behavior—provide a foundation upon which infants learn about and engage in the social world. Theories contend that through reciprocal, contingently responsive exchanges with caregivers, infants come to understand others as social partners with whom to share their attention and experience (Legerstee, 2005; Rochat & Striano, 1999). Although there is some empirical evidence that early abilities to detect contingencies predicts later interactive social skills (Reeb-Sutherland et al., 2012), there is a general paucity of longitudinal research examining how social contingency supports infants’ social learning and development. Furthermore, the neural mechanisms supporting infants’ contingency detection, and the general role of the infant brain in social skills as they first emerge in infancy is still little explored or understood. The present study tests the hypotheses that increased experience with contingent caregiving influences infants’ social communication and interaction, and shapes infants’ real-time neural responses during contingent interactions, which in turn support their emerging social-interactive skills.
In a home visit, typically developing 4-month-old infants interacted with their mothers in unstructured 5-minute freeplay sessions. Maternal contingent responsiveness was assessed with the ‘Parent Acknowledgment’ scale of the Coding Interactive Behavior (CIB) coding scheme (Feldman, 1998), and infants’ joint attention skills, communicative attempts, and vocalizations were assessed with the ‘Gaze’, ‘Initiation’, and ‘Vocalization’ CIB scales. Six months later in a lab visit at 10-months-old, we recorded infants’ neural responses (with event-related electroencephalogram, EEG) to their mothers’ behaviors during real-time contingent and non-contingent interactions: In two conditions, mothers were instructed to imitate their infants (to maximize contingent responding), and then to follow instructions delivered through an ear-piece (to maximize non-contingent behavior). Infants’ neural activity (6-9 hz event-related alpha suppression) to each type of maternal response (imitative or non-contingent) was extracted. At this 10-month lab visit, we also measured maternal contingent responsiveness and infants’ joint attention and communicative attempts during mother-infant unstructured interactions with the same CIB scales.
Maternal contingent responsiveness was concurrently related to infants’ joint attention and communicative attempts at both 4 and 10 months of age (see Figure 1), and was longitudinally (r = -.55, p = .012, N = 20) and concurrently (r = .46, p = .040, N = 20) related to infants’ real-time neural responses during maternal contingent interactions at 10 months (Figure 2a). Infants’ neural responses during contingent interactions also concurrently related to their joint attention skills (r = -.48, p = .003, N = 20; Figure 2b). Furthermore, infants’ neural responses mediated the relation between 4-month maternal contingent responsiveness and 10-month infant joint attention (Figure 2c, N = 20). These findings demonstrate the critical role of social contingency in the development of infants’ social and communicative skills.

Authors

• Lindsay Caroline Bowman, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Serena K Mon, Northwestern University

• Tahli Ida Frenkel, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Ziama Arkin Infancy Institute