Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK.
Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Dev Psychobiol. 2022 Sep;64(6):e22290. doi: 10.1002/dev.22290.
Caregiver touch is crucial for infants' healthy development, but its role in shaping infant cognition has been relatively understudied. In particular, despite strong premises to hypothesize its function in directing infant attention to social information, little empirical evidence exists on the topic. In this study, we investigated the associations between naturally occurring variation in caregiver touch and infant social attention in a group of 6- to 13-month-old infants (n = 71). Additionally, we measured infant salivary oxytocin as a possible mediator of the effects of touch on infant social attention. The hypothesized effects were investigated both short term, with respect to touch observed during parent-infant interactions in the lab, and long term, with respect to parent-reported patterns of everyday touching behaviors. We did not find evidence that caregiver touch predicts infant social attention or salivary oxytocin levels, short term or long term. However, we found that salivary oxytocin predicted infant preferential attention to faces relative to nonsocial objects, measured in an eye-tracking task. Our findings confirm the involvement of oxytocin in social orienting in infancy, but raise questions regarding the possible environmental factors influencing the infant oxytocin system.
照料者的触摸对婴儿的健康发育至关重要，但它在塑造婴儿认知方面的作用相对较少被研究。特别是，尽管有强有力的前提假设表明它在引导婴儿注意社会信息方面的作用，但关于这个主题的实证证据很少。在这项研究中，我们调查了 6 至 13 个月大的婴儿（n=71）群体中自然发生的照料者触摸与婴儿社会注意力之间的关联。此外，我们还测量了婴儿唾液中的催产素，作为触摸对婴儿社会注意力影响的可能中介。我们既研究了短期的影响，即实验室中观察到的父母与婴儿互动期间的触摸，也研究了长期的影响，即父母报告的日常触摸行为模式。我们没有发现证据表明照料者的触摸可以预测婴儿的社会注意力或短期或长期的唾液催产素水平。然而，我们发现，在眼动追踪任务中，唾液催产素可以预测婴儿相对于非社会性物体对人脸的偏好注意力。我们的研究结果证实了催产素在婴儿社会定向中的作用，但也提出了一些关于可能影响婴儿催产素系统的环境因素的问题。
