The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-To-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction

Cognitive development is associated with how predictable caregivers are, but the mechanisms driving this are unclear. One possibility is caregiver predictability initially shapes how infants gather information for learning. Here, caregiver-infant dyads (N = 222, 2-6-months-old, all female caregivers; data collected 2022-2023) in South Africa and Malawi engaged in naturalistic play before their interactions were hand-annotated to measure caregiver predictability and infant gaze. In both countries, temporal variation in caregiver predictability shaped infant looking dynamics-infants attended to specific sensory signals (η² = 0.04) and specific timepoints (η² = 0.10) that were useful for them based on their caregiver's typical behavior. These findings provide a framework by which the predictability of caregiver behavior may shape fundamental, early optimization of visual attention for learning in infancy and later cognitive development.