The Social Context of Infant Intention Understanding

Abstract

Traditional looking-time paradigms are often used to assess infants' attention to sociocognitive phenomena, but the link between these laboratory scenarios and real-world interactions is unclear. The current study investigated hypothesized relations between traditional social-cognitive looking-time paradigms and their real-world counterparts in caregiver–infant social interaction. Seventy-five 10- to 12-month-old infants participated in a structured play session with their caregiver, as well as a traditional looking-time paradigm targeting intentional action. Infants' ability to quickly parse intentional displays correlated with several key qualities of their everyday interactions. In particular, caregiver and infant interaction quality, maternal supportiveness, caregiver and infant joint engagement skill, and social attentiveness in infants correlated with faster habituation to looking-time displays. These results support a linkage between social-cognitive looking-time laboratory paradigms and more naturalistic partner interaction, at this key age. The data provide external validation for the large body of social-cognitive findings emerging from laboratory looking-time paradigms and contribute to a growing literature tracking the developmental trajectory of infants' understanding of people during the first 2 years.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grant HD022149 to Henry Wellman.

Notes

*Items used in the aggregate “Infant Social Attentiveness” (described in Table 3).

^a Individual items for these aggregates are described in Table 1.

^a Individual items for these factors are described in Table 1.

*p < .05.

**p < .01.

Note. Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis. Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization. Rotation converged in four iterations. Factor loadings above .50 are bolded. FP = Free-play session; T = Teaching session.