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Infants' Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age

Maleen Thiele1,2, Robert Hepach3, Christine Michel2,4

  • 1Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Child Development
|July 22, 2021
PubMed

Insights

Infants aged 7-13.5 months show increasing visual attention to social interactions. This development parallels their growing social engagement, including joint attention, during parent-infant interactions.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Infant Social Cognition

Background:

  • Early infancy is a critical period for social development.
  • Understanding how infants process social information is key to understanding cognitive development.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the development of visual orienting to third-party social interactions in infants.
  • To examine the parallel development of social attention behavior during infant-caregiver interactions.

Main Methods:

  • Longitudinal study of Western infants aged 7 to 13.5 months in Leipzig, Germany.
  • Experiment 1: Measured visual attention to social interactions and social engagement during free play.
  • Experiment 2: Replicated findings and analyzed continuous developmental trajectories.

Main Results:

  • Older infants (9.5-11 months) showed greater visual attention to dyadic interactions compared to younger infants.
  • Infants demonstrated increased social engagement, including joint attention, with age.
  • Both measures showed continuous developmental increases from 7 to 13.5 months.

Conclusions:

  • Infants' ability to orient attention to third-party social interactions develops in parallel with their own social engagement.
  • These findings suggest a coordinated development of social attention mechanisms in early infancy.

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