Poster #12 - The Moderating Role of Individual Differences in Early Learning and Approach Behavior

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Over the first few months of life infants are exposed to and particularly sensitive to contingencies within their environment. Previous research has shown that individual differences in this contingency detection are crucial to the development of later social outcomes. Throughout development, contingencies become less stable and can change at a very high pace. The ability to flexibly adapt to these changing contingencies is therefore essential to the development of later social outcomes. Evidence suggest that those individuals who have a harder time adapting to changing contingencies show greater levels of impulsivity, and increased risk-taking propensity (i.e., substance use). Thus, examining one’s abilities to learn social contingencies in relation to their extinction of these contingencies may allow us to emulate such reversal learning.
While impulsive behavior is not said to peak until adolescence, research has shown that individual differences in early temperament may be associated with these later outcomes. One temperamental style of interest is exuberance. Exuberant children have been described as positively reactivity to novelty, sociable, and likely to approach unfamiliar adults and stimuli. This positive affect and approach behavior has been linked to fearlessness, increased sensitivity to reward, and impulsivity. Exuberance has also been linked to later negative outcomes such as externalizing behavioral problems, particularly among those are unable to regulate their approach behaviors, and previous research shows support for increased impulsivity and risk-taking within this subset of individuals.
The current study analyzed archival footage of 60 five-month-old infants (M=5.2 months, SD=.21 months) engaging in a social contingency task consisting of three 3-minute phases: habituation, social contingency, and extinction phase. During social contingency, the experimenter responded contingently to the infant, responding to vocalizations with social rewards such as touch and praise. This contingent rewarding no longer continued into the extinction phase. At twelve months of age, the infants’ reactions to an unfamiliar adult were assessed as a measure of approach behaviors. Learning slopes were calculated for each infant during the first 60 seconds of contingency (range=-.20–.13) and extinction (range=-.14–.19). Moderation analysis revealed the relation between how quickly infants learn to extinguish their social behaviors when contingency is removed from an interaction and later social approach was significantly moderated by how quickly infants learn the social contingency [β=.377, b=28.550, p<.05, 95%CI [6.424, 50.675], R2=.147, see Figure 1]. Specifically, infants who displayed a low extinction rate, but high social contingency rate were the fastest to approach a stranger. In contrast, those who displayed both low social contingency and extinction rates took the longest time to approach the stranger. The current results suggest that individual differences in how quickly one detects contingency may moderate the relation between the ability to adapt to changing contingencies (i.e., reversal learning) and approach behavior, such that infants who exhibited both early rapid learning and extinction displayed higher levels of later approach behavior.

Authors

• Michelle Lee Ramos, Florida International University
  Presenting Author

• Bethany Reeb-Sutherland, Florida International University
  Non-Presenting Author