THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INFANT VISUAL ATTENTIVENESS AND MATERNAL BEHAVIOR DURING FACE-TO-FACE INTERACTION: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF 3- AND 6-MONTH-OLD DOWN'S SYNDROME AND NONDELAYED INFANTS

SUSAN MCQUISTON, Purdue University

Abstract

This research focused on the relationship between the infant's developmental status, his or her visual attentive behavior during mother-infant face-to-face interaction, and the intensity, timing and expression of the mother's social interactive behavior. Eleven Down's syndrome and 11 nondelayed infants were observed at 3 and 6 months during face-to-face interaction with their mothers. Three conditions of maternal activity were examined: Spontaneous Play, Still Face, and Imitation. The findings indicated that the social interactive behaviors of Down's syndrome infants and their mothers differed from those of nondelayed mother-infant dyads and that these two groups exhibited different development profiles. Tactile stimulation emerged as the most salient component of the mother's behavior which was related to infant visual attentiveness and which differentiated between mothers of Down's syndrome and nondelayed infants. As Down's syndrome infants increased their visual attentiveness across age, their mothers showed corresponding increases in the amount of vigorous tactile stimulation they provided. In contrast, increases in the tactile stimulation of mothers of nondelayed infants accompanied decreases in their infants' visual attentiveness from 3 to 6 months. The results suggest that both compensatory and reciprocal influences on social behavior are evident in the interactions of mothers and infants. Transitional probability analyses also highlighted the importance of maternal tactile stimulation for the infant's visual attentive behavior: infants were more likely to initiate and terminate their periods of gaze when the mother was not providing vigorous tactile stimulation. The initiation and termination of infant gaze was not systematically related to other modalities of maternal stimulation. It was suggested that tactile stimulation is particularly relevant to infant visual attentiveness in the first 6 months of life and that other dimensions of the mother's behavior, such as facial expressiveness and vocalization, influence the infant's visual behavior at later stages in development. Further research is needed to identify developmental changes in the relationship between dimensions of maternal stimulation and the infant's gaze behavior. Finally, with regard to the experimental manipulations of maternal activity, it was found that the mother's imitative behavior increased her infant's visual attentiveness over all and increased the mean length of visual fixations; alterations in maternal behavior had no effect on the frequency of the infant's gazes or the mean duration of gaze-away periods. Based on these results, it was suggested that the infant's increased attentiveness during Imitation reflected an alterting response to a novel stimulus and that the mother's imitative behavior did not necessarily place fewer information processing demands on the infant, as previous research has indicated.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

Developmental psychology

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