Time Series Analysis of Parent and Infant Object Exchanges: From Asynchronous to Coordinated Interaction

• In Event: 2-035 - Exploratory Actions and the Development of Acting with Others

Integrative Statement

During early development, the coordination of movement between parent and infant is an important skill for effective social interactions. Recent research suggest how parents play a large role in initiating this process by demonstrating collaborative behaviors while also making complex information more accessible to infants by holding objects closer to their view while they undergo changes in motor development (Pereira, Smith, & Yu, 2014). In the present symposium, we propose a critical developmental shift in turn-taking behaviors between parent and child (signifying early social and cognitive development) with the focus on object exchanges. We present an analysis of the frequency of parent-child object exchanges to document how the caregivers' object holding initially helps to establish a coordinated, social interaction feedback loop, with the stabilization of this process in late infancy.
We recorded parents and their infants interacting with each other (age range was 6 to 24 months) during a 5-minute play session that involved teaching a series of words using common objects. Infants wore a head-mounted eye tracker to capture visual input throughout the session. Using information from the eye tracker and additional video sources, we were able to annotate the precise moment when object holding events and object exchanges occurred during the session.
The present analysis characterizes repeated object exchanges between parent and child as a set of coordinated movements. The advantage of this description allows for analyzing the temporal dynamics of behavior as coupled, periodic oscillations. We created a time series of object holding events for each dyad and for all objects, and then decomposed the signal using the cross-wavelet transform to obtain the dominant frequency (from a power spectrum analysis, see Issartel, Bardainne, Gaillot, Ludovic 2015 for an introduction). These frequencies describe the rate at which object exchanges between parent and child are most likely to take place while observing how they change with development. The analysis revealed a rapid increase in object exchanges as infants get older, a time when infant and parent both take part in object holding (Fig. 1C). Since the wavelet transform localizes frequencies at specific time segments, this allowed us to extract object exchanges that match the dominant frequency. For these exchanges, object-holding rate increases as infant’s involvement increases (Fig. 1D). This shift leads to observing more instances of each object as the infant and parent become more involved in their interactions over time (Fig. 1E). Interestingly, we observed no age-related differences between completely separate turn-taking bouts, indicating the constant active interaction throughout each session across developmental periods (Fig. 1F).
The observation that parents start with slow, infrequent, and deliberate object showing events during early infancy and progressively increase the rate of object exchanges (and allowing for increased participation from the infant) suggests a shift from asynchronous object showing tendencies to more cooperative behaviors later in infancy. We discuss the importance of synchronous parent behaviors early in infancy in order to establish the same synchronous, collaborative behaviors between parent and child, and necessary for interacting with others during later development.

Authors

• Joseph M Burling, University of California, Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Hanako Yoshida, University of Houston
  Non-Presenting Author