Investigating looking and social looking measures as an index of infant violation of expectation

• Published in: Developmental science Vol. 20; no. 6
• Main Authors: Dunn, Kirsty, Bremner, J. Gavin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01-11-2017; John Wiley and Sons Inc
• Subjects: Analysis of Variance; Attention - physiology; Babies; Child development; Child Development - physiology; Familiarity; Female; Habituation; Habituation, Psychophysiologic; Humans; Infant; Infant Behavior - physiology; Infants; Male; Photic Stimulation; Short Report; Short Reports; Social Behavior
• ISSN: 1363-755X; 1467-7687
• DOI: 10.1111/desc.12452

Accumulated looking time has been widely used to index violation of expectation (VoE) response in young infants. But there is controversy concerning the validity of this measure, with some interpreting infant looking behaviour in terms of perceptual preferences (Cohen & Marks, ; Haith, ). The current study aimed to compare the use of looking time with a recently used measure of social looking (Walden et al., ) in distinguishing between 6‐month‐old infants’ response to novelty/familiarity and a condition in which the object was covertly switched for a different object. Following habituation, infants showed more social looking in response to the object‐switch condition than the novel object change, whereas the more commonly used accumulated looking time measure did not distinguish between the two, showing an increase for both. Thus, social looking is a more valid measure of infant VoE than looking time.
This study compared the commonly‐used measure of looking time to the more recently introduced measure of social looking (Walden et al., ) as an index of 6‐month‐olds' response to perceptual novelty and violation of expectation (VoE). The results presented indicate the measurement of infant social looking may provide a more unambiguous measure of VoE than looking time.