Infant Behavior and Development ifferent patterns of contingent stimulation differentially affect ttention span in prelinguistic infants

The ability to sustain attention influences different domains including cognitive, motor, and communicative behavior. Previous research has demonstrated how an infant’s parent can influence sustained attention. The purpose of our study was to expose infants systematically to both sensitive and redirective patterns of behavior to examine how unfamiliar individuals could influence attention. Results revealed infants changed their patterns of looking with the unfamiliar individuals. Infants had longer durations of sustained attention when interacting with a sensitive unfamiliar individual who followed into their attentional focus as opposed to an intrusive person who led their attentional focus. This study demonstrates that infants discriminate patterns of contingency to persons seen for only a short period of time broadening the range of potential mentors for learning. © 2009 Published by Elsevier Inc. To analyze an individual’s social development involves uncovering how experience with different individuals affords ifferent learning opportunities (West, King, & White, 2003). Although attention is most often studied with respect to erceptual and cognitive development, it also plays a social role, as it is instructive in learning how to use novel social nformation to reach functional decisions such as approach or avoid, move or stay, or give or take. In the present study, we carried out a detailed examination of infant attention at 9 months of age, with special focus n the frequency and duration of sequences of infant attention with unfamiliar persons. We used unfamiliar adults to see f infants would respond to conventional patterns of social responsiveness when coming from a new source. If they did, it ould strengthen the argument that infants are attending to the presence of a contingency instead of, or in addition to, a lose social relationship between familiar (“attached”) parents and infants. We exploited two attributes of parental behavior: ensitive and redirective responsiveness. Parental sensitivity is defined as contingent and appropriate responding to a child’s ehavior or focus of attention (Ainsworth, 1973; Baumwell, Tamis-LeMonda, & Bornstein, 1997; Bornstein, 1989). Parental edirectiveness or intrusiveness, on the other hand, occurs when the parent responds contingently but inappropriately to a hild’s behavior or attentional focus, interrupting or redirecting the flow of the child’s attention (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, Wall, 1978; Baumwell et al., 1997). For example, if a child picks up a toy duck, an individual responding sensitively may say, Yes, that’s a yellow duck,” while an individual responding intrusively or redirectively may refer to another object altogether, edirecting the child’s attention and saying, “Look at this toy plane. ” Therefore, in interactions with sensitive individuals, the Please cite this article in press as: Miller, J. L. , et al. Different patterns of contingent stimulation differentially affect attention span in prelinguistic infants. Infant Behavior and Development (2009), doi:10.1016/j.infbeh. 2009.02. 003 hild maintains the key role in guiding the topic of the interaction, while in interactions with redirective individuals, the ocial partner mainly controls the interaction and attempts to direct the child’s behavior and attentional focus. Much research has investigated the relationship between characteristic maternal responses and attentional, social, cogniive, communicative, and emotional outcomes in children. Researchers have found that while maternal sensitivity is typically ∗ Corresponding author. Tel. : +1 812 855 1297. E-mail address: jlm19@indiana.edu (J.L. Miller). 163-6383/$ – see front matter © 2009 Published by Elsevier Inc. oi:10.1016/j.infbeh. 2009.02. 003 ARTICLE IN PRESS G Model INFBEH-522; No. of Pages 8 2 J.L. Miller et al. / Infant Behavior & Development xxx (2009) xxx–xxx associated with positive outcomes, maternal redirectiveness is either negatively associated with or shows no relation to developmental outcomes in children (De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997; Landry, Smith, Miller-Loncar, & Swank, 1997; Stams, Juffer, & van IJzendoorn, 2002). Maternal sensitivity is related to security of attachment (De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997) and positive social development (Landry et al., 1997; Stams et al., 2002) in infants, and it is thought that sensitive caregivers foster children’s social development by responding appropriately to their children’s actions, thus instilling a sense of social effectiveness and importance in the child (Landry et al., 1997; Lewis & Goldberg, 1969). In contrast, maternal redirectiveness is often associated with insecure attachment (Ainsworth et al., 1978) and negative social development or behavioral problems (Pettit, Harrist, Bates, & Dodge, 1991). Maternal sensitivity is also positively related to cognitive and communicative development (Baumwell et al., 1997; Landry et al., 1997; Stams et al., 2002; Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, & Baumwell, 2001), while maternal redirectiveness is correlated with poor communicative development as well as poor academic performance in the early school years (Della Corte, Benedict, & Klein, 1983; Snow, 1989; Tomasello & Farrar, 1986). Maternal sensitivity and attachment security predict positive social and cognitive development even in adopted children, indicating the importance of maternal responsiveness in infants’ socio-cognitive development regardless of genetic relatedness (Stams et al., 2002). Experimental manipulations of social partner responsiveness have strengthened the argument that adult responsiveness influences different outcomes in infants. For example, Belsky, Goode, and Most (1980) not only used observational studies to document that maternal sensitivity positively correlates with more focused exploration between 9and 18-month-old infants, but also demonstrated that experimentally increasing maternal sensitivity leads to more focused and competent object exploration by 12-month-old infants. van den Boom (1994) demonstrated similar results by exposing caregivers of 6-month-old infants to a 3-month-long intervention directed at increasing maternal sensitivity. When assessed at 9 months, the infants whose parents were assigned to the intervention condition (improving caregiver sensitivity) had more focused, more sophisticated object exploration than did the infants whose parents did not receive the intervention treatment (van den Boom, 1994). Riksen-Walraven (1978) also showed that increasing parent sensitivity, but not overall amount of stimulation, resulted in more focused exploration as well as a greater ability in infants to detect contingencies in 9-month-old infants. While the effects of maternal responsiveness on infant attention are well-documented, the influence of other social partners on infant attention have been largely understudied. Parrinello and Ruff (1988) investigated possible influences of unfamiliar adults on 10-month-old infants. After measuring a baseline level of sustained attention, the researchers assigned infants to a low, medium, high, or no intervention group. The intervention consisted of a short exposure to an unfamiliar adult in which the frequency of object manipulations and energy displayed while manipulating objects varied by group. For example, infants in the high intervention group were exposed to the most object manipulations and the highest amount of enthusiasm and vigor. The researchers found that infants in the medium intervention group increased their duration of focused attention during the intervention significantly more than infants in the no intervention group (Parrinello & Ruff, 1988). This study demonstrates that even brief periods of exposure to novel social partners can influence infant attention, although it is unclear what aspect of the adult behavior was causing infants to increase their focused attention. Although manipulations of maternal behavior showed attentional effects, mothers and infants possess such a long history with one another that they may also be using cues other than those targeted by the experimenter. What if we remove that familiarity? The current study aimed to explore the potential influence of unfamiliar adults on infant attention by systematically exposing 9-month-old infants to two unfamiliar adults who behaved either sensitively or redirectively. First, infants interacted with their parent in a naturalistic free-play setting and then infants were sequentially exposed to both sensitive and redirective unfamiliar adults. We predicted that infants would shift their attention more frequently and therefore have shorter durations of sustained attention, when interacting with the redirective individual than when interacting with the sensitive individual, supporting a causal role of temporal contingency on focused attention by infants.