Caregiver-infant interactions

• Caregiver-infant interactions

  Reciprocity


  Research shows infants can coordinate with their caregivers in what seems like a conversation - Babies take turns whilst speaking

  • Brazelton suggests this is a basic rhythm, important for future communication
  • The regularity of the infant's signals allows caregiver to anticipate infant's behavior & respond appropriately, creating attachment between caregiver & infant
  • Mutual, two-way process, mimicking a conversation, with features such as turn-taking
• Caregiver-infant interactions

  Interactional synchrony

  Meltzoff and Moore (1977)

  • Demonstrated how babies as young as 2-3 weeks can imitate facial expressions & hand gestures
  • An adult model demonstrated 3 facial expressions
  • a dummy was placed in the baby's mouth, preventing response
  • After the display, the dummy is removed, the baby's expressions are filmed
  • There was an association between the infant & model behaviour, infant tried to imitate the model's behaviour
• Real or pseudo imitation?

  Jean Piaget believed true imitation can only happen towards the end of the infant's 1st year. any imitation before is due to response training, the infant repeats rewarded behaviour because of reinforcement.
• Support of interactional synchrony


  Murray (1985) 2 month old babies interacted with their mothers via a video monitor in real time. Next, the babies watched a pre-recorded video of their mothers, the children showed distress at this as they couldn't gain their mother's interest.

  This shows the infant is an active participant in interactions, supporting the idea behaviours are innate.
• A03, caregiver-infant interactions

  Problems with testing infant behaviour

  Is testing infant behaviour always reliable?

  • Infants mouths are in constant motion with the tested expression of Meltzoff & Moore's study.
  • It's difficult to distinguish between general activity & imitation
  • M&M overcame this by asking an observer (who had not idea what the imitated behaviour was) to judge the infant's behaviour from the videos.

  This shows the difficulty of testing infants but also how to reslove this, increasing internal validity
• A03, caregiver-infant interactions

  Failure to replicate


  • Koepke et Al failed to replicate Meltzoff and Moore's study, according to Meltzoff however, this was due to a lack of control when replicating the study
  • Marian et Al replicated the study by Murray, found infants could distinguish the live video from the taped video, suggesting infants do not respond to adults. However, this finding may be due to the procedure

  Earlier study findings weren't replicable, this may however be due to methods used in later studies
• A03, Caregiver-infant interactions

  Intentionality supported


  Another method to test intentionality in infants is to observe how they respond to inanimate objects.

  Abravnel and DeYong observed infant behaviour when interacting with 2 objects stimulating:

  • Tongue movements
  • Mouth opening/closing

  Infants aged 5-12 weeks made little response to objects

  Suggesting infants don't imitate everything but socially respond to humans
• A03, caregiver-infant interactions

  Individual differences


  Variation between infants in interactional synchrony

  • Isabella et Al found that more strongly attached infants showed greater interactional synchrony
  • Heiman showed infants who demonstrate lots of imitation from birth on wards form better quality relationships at 3 months. However, it isn't clear if this is due to early imitations

  There are significant individual differences but cause of difference isn't certain