Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, California, USA.
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, USA.
Dev Sci. 2018 Jul;21(4):e12626. doi: 10.1111/desc.12626. Epub 2017 Oct 26.
Face-to-face interaction between infants and their caregivers is a mainstay of developmental research. However, common laboratory paradigms for studying dyadic interaction oversimplify the act of looking at the partner's face by seating infants and caregivers face to face in stationary positions. In less constrained conditions when both partners are freely mobile, infants and caregivers must move their heads and bodies to look at each other. We hypothesized that face looking and mutual gaze for each member of the dyad would decrease with increased motor costs of looking. To test this hypothesis, 12-month-old crawling and walking infants and their parents wore head-mounted eye trackers to record eye movements of each member of the dyad during locomotor free play in a large toy-filled playroom. Findings revealed that increased motor costs decreased face looking and mutual gaze: Each partner looked less at the other's face when their own posture or the other's posture required more motor effort to gain visual access to the other's face. Caregivers mirrored infants' posture by spending more time down on the ground when infants were prone, perhaps to facilitate face looking. Infants looked more at toys than at their caregiver's face, but caregivers looked at their infant's face and at toys in equal amounts. Furthermore, infants looked less at toys and faces compared to studies that used stationary tasks, suggesting that the attentional demands differ in an unconstrained locomotor task. Taken together, findings indicate that ever-changing motor constraints affect real-life social looking.
婴儿及其照顾者之间的面对面互动是发展研究的基础。然而,研究对偶互动的常见实验室范式通过让婴儿和照顾者面对面坐在固定位置,简化了看对方脸的行为。在双方都可以自由移动的不那么受限的情况下,婴儿和照顾者必须移动他们的头和身体来互相看。我们假设,对于对偶中的每个成员,看脸和相互注视的次数会随着看的运动成本的增加而减少。为了验证这一假设,我们让 12 个月大的爬行和行走婴儿及其父母佩戴头戴式眼动追踪器,在一个充满大型玩具的游戏室中自由玩耍时记录对偶中每个成员的眼动。研究结果表明,运动成本的增加减少了看脸和相互注视的次数:当自己的姿势或对方的姿势需要更多的运动努力才能看到对方的脸时,每个伙伴看对方脸的次数就会减少。照顾者通过在婴儿趴着时更多地待在地上来模仿婴儿的姿势,这可能有助于他们看对方的脸。婴儿看玩具的次数多于看照顾者的脸,但照顾者看婴儿的脸和玩具的次数相等。此外,与使用固定任务的研究相比,婴儿看玩具和脸的次数较少,这表明在不受限制的运动任务中,注意力的需求不同。总之,研究结果表明,不断变化的运动限制会影响现实生活中的社交看脸。