Don’t need - Caregiver-infant Interaction

Question 1

What is attachment?

Answer 1

An emotional bond between two people.
It is a two-way process that endures over time.
It leads to certain behaviours such as clinging and proximity-seeking, and serves the function of protecting an infant.

Question 2

What is a caregiver?

Answer 2

Any person who is providing care for a child.

Such as a parent, grandparent, sibling, other family members, childminder and so on.

Question 3

What is interactional synchrony?

Answer 3

When two people interact they tend to mirror what the other is doing in terms of their facial expressions and body movement.

This includes imitating emotions as well as behaviours.
This is described as synchrony - when two or more things move in the same pattern.

Question 4

What is reciprocity?

Answer 4

Responding to the actions of another with a similar action, where the actions of one partner elicit a response from the other partner.

The responses are not necessarily similar as in interactional synchrony

Question 5

Who conducted a study of interactional synchrony?

Answer 5

Meltzoff and Moore

Question 6

When was Meltzoff and Moore’s study conducted?

Answer 6

1977

Question 7

What was the procedure of Meltzoff and Moore’s study?

Answer 7

The study was conducted using an adult model who displayed one of three facial expressions or hand movements where fingers moved in a sequence.
A dummy was placed in the infants mouth during the initial display to prevent any response.
Following the display the dummy was removed and the child’s expression was filmed on a video.

Question 8

What did Meltzoff and Moore find? (1977)

Answer 8

Found that infants as young as 2 to 3 weeks old imitate specific facial and hand gestures.
They found that there was an association between the infant and that of the adult.

Question 9

What did Meltzoff and Moore demonstrate later?

Answer 9

In a later study (1983) they demonstrated the same synchrony with infants only 3 days old.

Question 10

What did Meltzoff and Moore’s later study show?

Answer 10

The fact that infants as young as this were displaying the behaviour would appear to rule out the possibility that the imitation behaviours are learned (the behavioural response must be innate).

Question 11

What did Meltzoff and Moore propose?

Answer 11

Imitation is intentional (the infant is deliberately copying what the other person it doing).

Question 12

What did Piaget believe?

Answer 12

True imitation only developed towards the end of the first year and anything before this was a kind of ‘response training’.

So Piaget’s view was what the infant would be doing was just pseudo-imitation.

Question 13

What’s response training?

Answer 13

What the infant is doing is repeating a behaviour that was rewarded (i.e. the result of operant conditioning).

E.g. an infant might happen to stick its tongue out after seeing a caregiver do this. The consequence would be that the caregiver smiles, which is experienced as rewarding, encouraging the infant to repeat the same behaviour next time.

Question 14

What is pseudo-imitation?

Answer 14

The infant has not consciously translated what they see into a matching movement

Question 15

What evidence is there to support Meltzoff and Moore?

Answer 15

Evidence presented in a study by Murray and Trevarthen (1985).

Question 16

What happened in Murray and Trevarthen’s study?

Answer 16

2 month old infants first interacted via a video monitor with their mother in real time.
In the next part of the study the video monitor played a tape of the mother so that the image on screen was not responding to the infants facial and bodily gestures.
The result was the infants tried to attract their mothers interest but, gaining no response, turned away. This shows that the infant is actively eliciting a response rather than displaying a response that has been rewarded, showing that they are an active and intentional partner in the interactions.

Question 17

What are the evaluative points for Meltzoff and Moore?

Answer 17

Problems with testing infant behaviour
Failure to replicate 
Is the behaviour intentional?
Individual differences 
The value of the research

Question 18

What is meant by problems with testing infant behaviour?

Answer 18

There is reason to have some doubt about the findings becuase of the difficulties in reliably testing infant behaviour.
Infants mouths are in fairly constant motion and the expressions that are tested occur frequently. This makes it difficult to distinguish between general activity and specific imitated behaviour.

Question 19

What did Meltzoff and Moore do to overcome the problems with testing infant behaviour?

Answer 19

Measured infant responses by filming infants ad asking an observer to judge the infants behaviour from the video.
The person doing the judging had no idea what behaviour was being imitated, which increased the internal validity of the data.

Question 20

What is meant by failure to replicate?

Answer 20

Other studies have failed to replicate the findings of the studies.
For example, a study by Koepke (1983) failed to replicate Meltzoff and Moore’s findings (the counter-argued Koepke’s was less carefully controlled).

Marian (1996) replicated the study by Murray and Trevarthen and found that infants couldn’t distinguish live from videotaped interactions with their mothers, suggesting the infants are actually not responding to the adult.

However, Marian acknowledged that the problem may lie with the procedure rather than the ability to imitate their caregivers.

Question 21

What is meant by is the behaviour intentional?

Answer 21

Another method used to test intentionality of infant behaviour is to observe how they respond to inanimate objects.

Abravanel and DeYoung (1991) observed infant behaviour when ‘interacting’ with two objects, one stimulating tongue movement and the other mouth opening/closing.

They found that infants of a median age 5 and 12 weeks made little response to the objects.
They concluded that this shows that infants do not just initiate anything they see - it is a specific social response to other humans.

Question 22

What is meant by individual differences?

Answer 22

An important feature of interactional synchrony is that there is some variation between infants.
Isabelle (1989) found that more strongly attached infant-caregiver pairs showed greater interactional synchrony (suggests relationship between closeness of synchrony and strength of attachment).

Heimann (1989) showed that infants who demonstrate a lot of imitation from birth onwards have been found to have a better quality of relationship at 3 months.

Question 23

What is meant by the value of the research?

Answer 23

The importance of this imitative behaviour is that it forms the basis for social development.
Meltzoff (2005) developed a ‘like me’ hypothesis of infant development based on his research on interactional synchrony.

So a strength of this research is that it explains how children begin to understand what others think and feel, and thus able to conduct relationships.

Question 24

What was Meltzoff’s ‘like me’ hypothesis?

Answer 24

He proposed that first there is the connection between what the infant sees and their imitation of this.
Second, infants associate their own acts and their own underlying mental states.
Third, infants project their own internal experiences onto others performing similar acts.

As a result infants begin to acquire an understanding of what other people are thinking and feeling.

Such understanding relates to what is called a theory of mind - understanding the mental states of others people. This is fundamental for conducting social relationships.