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Groupness in Preverbal Infants: Proof of Concept
Benjamin Sylvester Bradley1, Michael Smithson2
1School of Psychology, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst NSW, Australia.
Insights
Preverbal infants demonstrate groupness by 9 months, showing coordinated gaze in quartets, challenging the idea that infant sociability is solely dyadic. This research explores early group interaction capabilities.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Infant Social Behavior
- Group Dynamics
Background:
- Infant sociability is traditionally viewed through dyadic interactions.
- Previous research suggested infants achieve groupness by interacting with two others simultaneously.
- Existing studies often define groupness by alternating dyadic behaviors within a trio.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose and test a stricter, supra-dyadic criterion for infant groupness.
- To investigate whether infants' social behavior is influenced by the prior actions of multiple group members.
- To explore infant sociability in a novel quartet setting.
Main Methods:
- Developed a new threefold criterion for infant groupness, focusing on behavior influenced by multiple prior actions.
- Utilized a laboratory procedure involving infant-peer quartets (four infants) instead of trios.
- Analyzed gaze behavior during 5-minute interactions among two quartets of 6-9 month-old infants.
Main Results:
- Both infant quartets met the proposed criterion for groupness.
- Mutual gaze significantly predicted coordinated gaze (e.g., A-B mutual gaze followed by C looking at B).
- A notable absence of 'parallel mutual gaze' (infants pairing off) was observed.
Conclusions:
- Preverbal infants can exhibit supra-dyadic groupness under specific conditions.
- Findings challenge the assumption that infant group sociability is exclusively driven by dyadic interactions.
- This research opens new avenues for understanding early social cognition and group behavior.
Abstract:
Infant sociability is generally conceived in terms of dyadic capacities and behaviors. Recently, quantitative evidence has been published to support arguments that infants achieve a criterion for groupness: the capacity to interact simultaneously with two others. Such studies equate this capacity with alternating dyadic acts to the two other members of an interacting trio. Here we propose a stricter threefold criterion for infant groupness, of which the crux is whether the social behavior of an infant at time B is shown to be influenced by what two or more group-members were previously doing at time A. We test the viability of this conceptualization: (a) through its justification of the novel laboratory procedure of studying infant sociability in infant-peer quartets (rather than trios); and, (b) in an analysis of a pilot study of gaze-behavior recorded in 5-min interactions among two quartets of infants aged 6-9 months. We call this a 'proof of concept' because our aim is to show that infants are capable of groupness, when groupness is conceptualized in a supra-dyadic way-not that all infants will manifest it, nor that all conditions will produce it, nor that it is commonplace in infants' everyday lives. We found that both quartets did achieve the minimum criterion of groupness that we propose: mutual gaze predicting coordinated gaze (where two babies, A and B, are looking at each other, and B is then looked at by C, and sometimes D) more strongly than the reverse. There was a significant absence of 'parallel mutual gaze,' where the four babies pair off. We conclude that, under specific conditions, preverbal infants can manifest supra-dyadic groupness. Infants' capacities to exhibit groupness by 9 months of age, and the paucity of parallel mutual gaze in our data, run counter to the assumption that infant sociability, when in groups, is always generated by a dyadic program. Our conceptualization and demonstration of groupness in 8-month-olds thus opens a host of empirical, theoretical, and practical questions about the sociability and care of young babies.