Effects of active experience and parent interaction on infants’ learning about objects during sticky mittens

• In Event: Object-based understanding and learning: Roles of infant active experience and skill

Abstract

The sticky mittens (SM) training paradigm provides pre-reaching infants the opportunity to experience picking up and manipulating objects, skills which they have not yet developed (Needham et al., 2002). Researchers use this paradigm to better understand cognitive effects of early active experience with objects. Active, but not passive, SM experience has been shown to facilitate young infants’ visual attention to objects, object engagement, object exploration, and causal perception (e.g., Libertus & Needham, 2010; Sommerville et al., 2005; Rakison & Krogh, 2012). Typically, parents are allowed to interact freely with their infants during SM training, but it is unclear how parent interactions impact infant learning. In this talk, we will present two studies that address this subject. In Study 1, we examined the effects of active experience and parent encouragement during SM training on infants’ causal perception (Holt et al., in prep). Pre-reaching 4-month-old infants (N = 85, Mage = 4.23, SD = 0.50) and their parents were randomly assigned to one of five SM training conditions: no training (control), passive/no encouragement (PN), passive/encouragement (PE), active/no encouragement (AN), active/encouragement (AE). In active conditions, infants produced their own movements, whereas in passive conditions, parents controlled their infants’ arms. In encouragement conditions, parents were instructed to encourage their infants during SM training; in the no encouragement conditions, they were instructed not to talk. Causal perception was tested following SM training (see Figure 1). Infants were habituated to a non-causal launching event (delayed or gap), then tested on three test events in a randomized order: familiar (identical to habituation), novel non-causal, and novel causal. Both novel test events involved changes from habituation to test in temporal and spatial information, but only the causal test event involved a change on the basis of causality. Thus, causal perception was inferred when infants dishabituated to the causal test event but not the novel non-causal test event. Results showed that neither passive training conditions facilitated causal perception (see Figure 2). However, active experience facilitated infants’ causal perception in the AN but not in the AE condition (i.e., when parents were instructed not to talk). In Study 2, we test the hypothesis that parents’ behaviors in the AE condition interfered with infants’ attention to objects, and thus negatively impacted their learning, by conducting a secondary analysis of Holt et al. (in prep). Parent interactive behaviors and infant attention are being coded in videos of the two active SM training conditions (AN: N = 17; AE: N = 18;). We predict that infants in the AE condition will have lower rates of attention to objects without simultaneous interaction from parents (measure of interference) and higher rates of attention moving away from objects following a parent interaction (measure of distraction) compared to those of infants in the AN condition. Results of this work will provide important insights into the roles that active experience and parents play in young infants’ learning experiences.

Authors

• Nonah Olesen, University of Louisville
  Presenting Author

• Jalena N Slaton, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicholas A Holt
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cara H Cashon, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author