Caregiver-Infant interactions

Question 1

What are the 2 types of care giver infant interactions?

Answer 1

1. Reciprocity
2. Interactional synchrony

Question 2

What is reciprocity?

Answer 2

When a baby and caregive take turns in responding and interacting with eachothers signals and cues.

Question 3

What is interactional synchrony?

Answer 3

This is a simultaneous interaction between the infant and caregiver who appear to be acting rythmically, with matching, coordinated behaviour.

Question 4

Interactional synchrony

What did Meltzoff and Moore (1977) experiment find?

Answer 4

• They had displayed facial gestures such as sticking a toungue out and opening their mouth in shock to 12-21 day old infants.
• Recordings of infants responses were rated by people blind to the experiment.
• It was found that infant responses matched the experimenters facial expressions, suggesting the ability to observe and reciprocate through imitation is present from a very early age.

Question 5

Interactional synchrony

What did Isabella (1989) find?

Answer 5

-Isabella observed 30 mother and babies together and assesed the degree of synchrony, and the quality of mother-baby attatchment.
- They found that high levels of synchrony were associated with better quality mother-baby attatchment.

Question 6

One strength of research on caregiver infant interactions is that it has video research support.

Answer 6

Research support

• Conodn and Sander (1974) videotaped interactions between adults and infants, focusing on the movements of the infants in response to adult speech.
• Using a detailed frame-by-frame analysis of the video recordings, they found evidence of interactional synchrony/coordination between the infants movements and the rythmic patterns of the adults speech.
• These results suggest that even form birth, humans have an innate ability for social interaction.

Question 7

One limitation of research into caregiver infant interactions is that it is hard to interpret a babies behaviour.

Answer 7

The difficulty in observing babies

• they are not very co-ordinated. We just observe small gestures and small changes in expression.
• it is also hard to interpret the meaning of babies movements, e.g deciding if a hand movement is a repsonse to the caregiver or just a twitch.
• this means we cannot be certain that any particular interactions observed between the baby and the caregiver are meaningful.

Question 8

Another limitation is that simply observing a behaviour does not tell us its importance for development.

Answer 8

There is difficulty inferring developmental importance

• Feldman (2012) points out that synchrony and reciprocity simply describe behaviours that occur at the same time.
• These are robust phenomena in the sense that they can be observed, but this may not be useful as it does not tell us their purpose.
• This means that we cannot be certain from observations that reciprocity or synchrony are important in development.