Infants’ sensitivity to social contingency: a “double video” study of face-to-face communication between 2- and 4-month-olds and their mothers

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2003.09.004Get rights and content

Abstract

Infants’ and mothers’ gaze during three sequences of live face-to-face interaction were compared to sequences where their interaction was set out of phase, by presenting either the infant or the mother with a replay of their partners’ behavior during earlier live interaction in a closed circuit TV setup. There was a significant interaction between sequence and foci of the infants’ gaze, reflecting that infants looked significantly more at their mother during the live than the replay sequences. The infants also looked significantly more at their mother than at other foci during the live but not the replay sequences, which suggests that neither infant fatigue nor memory traces of earlier maternal behavior can account for the findings. These findings support the idea that young infants are capable of distinguishing between contingent and non-contingent social interaction with their mothers.

Introduction

Trevarthen (1979) put forward the theory of innate inter-subjectivity in humans to account for observations that infants and mothers were mutually regulating one another’s interests and feelings in a rhythmic pattern during early interaction (e.g., Bateson, 1975; Brazelton, Tronick, Adamson, Als, & Wise, 1975). A procedure that examines infants’ sensitivity to social contingency is the double video procedure, developed by Murray and Trevarthen (1985), where infants and their mothers can communicate by seeing one another’s facial expressions and hear one another’s vocalizations through a closed TV circuit.

Murray and Trevarthen (1985) found that four 2-month-olds looked significantly less at their mother when the interaction was set out of phase by presenting the infant with a televised replay of the mother’s behavior compared to when they engaged in televised live interaction. Several authors have, however, pointed out that since the replay always followed the live sequence, changes in the infants’ level of contingent interaction could have been confounded with a number of factors, such as changes in infant fussiness (Rochat, Neisser, & Marian, 1998), familiarity of the adult (Bigelow & Birch, 1999), memory of the previous maternal behavior (Hains & Muir, 1996), expectations of certain amounts of non-contingent behavior from their mothers (Bigelow, MacLean, & MacDonald, 1996; Hains & Muir, 1996), or differences in the degree the mothers mirror the infant’s affect (Legerstee & Varghese, 2001).

The failures to replicate the original findings of Murray and Trevarthen (1985) could, however, also be attributable to aspects in the experimental procedures. Nadel, Carchob, Kervella, Marcelli, and Réserbat-Plantey (1999) have shown that when it was ensured that the mother and the infant really were engaged in active interaction at the start of the experiment and that the infant’s attention at the mother was not diverted in the transitions between the Live and Replay sequences the initial findings of Murray and Trevarthen (1985) were supported. The most important finding was that infants evidenced increased gaze at the mother during a second Live sequence compared to the preceding Replay sequence indicating that fatigue cannot account for the results, although this comparison only reached statistical significance when three (of the original 10) infants who became upset during the replay sequence were excluded.

The main purpose of this study was to examine whether the decline in infant gaze at the mother during the replay sequence reported by Murray and Trevarthen (1985) and Nadel et al. (1999) could be accounted for by infant memory of the maternal behavior depicted on the video replay. Hains and Muir (1996) acknowledged the same possible explanation and controlled for this in their second study by letting half of the infants encounter a replay of a female stranger’s behavior during interaction with another infant, while the other half were presented with the regular replay procedure. Hains and Muir (1996) found that the infants’ gaze at the stranger declined during the replay sequence, in both groups of infants. However, none of the groups showed any increase in visual attention at the adult stranger in subsequent sequences of contingent interaction, which is also later found by Bigelow and DeCoste (2003) in relation to both strangers and mothers. This could suggest that responding during the non-contingent interaction carried over to subsequent sequences of contingent interaction, but also reflect fatigue or a decline in the infant’s interest in looking at the same person.

An alternative way to control for memory is to add a second replay sequence, where it is the mothers who are presented with a replay of their infants; while the infants see their mothers live. This arrangement represents equally non-contingent interaction as in the traditional replay sequence but the important difference is that the infants’ responses during this second replay sequence can not be accounted for by memory traces of previous maternal responses. The experimental setup in this study thus included five sequences, three live and two replay sequences in a Live1–Replay1–Live2–Replay2–Live3 order. If 2- to 4-month-olds are sensitive to social contingency and detects disruptions in social interaction, one would expect a decline in infant gaze at mother during both replay sequences.

Section snippets

Subjects

Fifteen mothers and infants were recruited via maternal and child health centers and from advertisements at the University campus. Data from two mother–infant dyads were excluded because of technical problems or that the mother and infant did not establish contact during the initial live sequence. Thus, the study included 13 mothers with their infants. Of these, 6 were girls and 7 were boys with a mean age of 13 weeks and 1 day (range 8–18 weeks).

Apparatus

Fig. 1 shows the experimental setup. The mothers

Results

There was a significant Foci×Sequence interaction (F(1,12)=6.89, P<0.05), which was explained by infants looking significantly more to their mothers during the Live than during the Replay sequences (F(1,12)=6.31, P<0.05). There was no significant effect for the other foci of the infants’ gaze. The drop in the infants’ gaze during Replay1 was not statistically different from either the previous Live1 or the subsequent Live2, but the infants’ level of gaze at the mother during Replay2 tended to

Discussion

To sum up the results; the infants looked more at their mothers during the sequences of live interaction than during the replay sequences where the communication between the infant and the mother was set out of phase. This effect was substantiated by an overall significant decline in gaze at mother during the replay versus the live sequences, and by the significant preference the infants exhibited towards looking at their mothers compared to other foci during all three live sequences, but not

References (18)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (43)

  • Social Origins of Cortical Face Areas

    2018, Trends in Cognitive Sciences
    Citation Excerpt :

    Face areas would develop at the confluence of both sources of input. Top-down signals of social value from nonvisual sources, such as contingency [58], affiliative touch [67], or infant-directed speech [61,62], would strengthen responses to faces when they co-occur, as when parents hold infants face-to-face while stroking or talking to them. Connectivity between face areas and mPFC does exist in adults, measured functionally in humans [85] and macaques [86], and by direct anatomical tracing in macaques [87].

  • Affective facial expression in sub-clinically depressed and non-depressed mothers during contingent and non-contingent face-to-face interactions with their infants

    2017, Infant Behavior and Development
    Citation Excerpt :

    All recorded videos were stored on PC1 and PC 2 during the experiment, and then copied to an external hard disk for further analyses. As in our previous studies (Braarud & Stormark, 2006, 2008; Skotheim et al., 2013; Stormark & Braarud, 2004), the DV experiment comprised five sequences in a fixed Live1-Replay1-Live2-Replay2-Live3 order. All five sequences consisted of a 60 s interval, in which video-recordings were made of the mother’s and the infant’s behavior.

  • Subclinical levels of maternal depression and infant sensitivity to social contingency

    2013, Infant Behavior and Development
    Citation Excerpt :

    This relationship was not found for the infants of the non-depressed mothers, who differentiated between the live and replay sequences, in terms of preferential looking at their mother only when the interactions with the mother was contingent. This finding accords with earlier findings of typically developing infants (Stormark & Braarud, 2004, Murray & Trevarthen, 1985; Nadel et al., 1999), infants with good affect regulation (Braarud & Stormark, 2006) and infants of non-depressed mothers (Nadel et al., 2005; Field et al., 2005). The finding that infants of sub-clinically depressed mothers did not differentiate in affective expression between the live and replay sequences, but showed an increase in negative affect after the first non-contingent interaction that lasted throughout the experiment is in accordance with the findings in Nadel et al. (2005) study.

View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text