Babies' 'interfaces' go beyond mom.

Babies' 'interfaces' go beyond mom

A 1-year-old girl responds to the encouragement of a woman she has never seen before and begins to explore the toys in a playroom. The child's mother looks on from the corner, a good 9 feet away. Suddenly, a remote-controlled robot toy emerges from under a cloth-covered table. The beeping robot slowly rolls toward the infant and stops just beyond her reach.

Will the child instinctively check out her mother's facial signals of safety or fear before deciding whether to approach the robot, or will she also act on cues from the friendly stranger? If the mother's expression is noncommittal, the child is likely to be influenced by the stranger's facial expression, according to a report in the July DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY.

A number of studies have demonstrated that infants look toward their mothers' facial expressions and use these emotional signals to guide their behavior in a wide variety of situations. But given the right circumstances, say Mary D. Klinnert of the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver and her colleagues, infants are influenced by a much broader group of adults than is often assumed.

Take the robot-toy example described above. Klinnert and her co-workers put 46 1-year-olds (25 girls and 21 boys) in this situation. When the beeping intruder appeared, an experimenter playing with the infants posed either happy or fearful expressions while the mother, sitting across the room, maintained a neutral expression. Mothers were usually able to keep a "straight face," as judged by observers behind a one-way mirror, but when they slipped into positive or negative expressions a child's behavior was excluded from the study.

The researchers found that 38 of the infants looked at the experimenter as well as their mothers after seeing the robot, and 30 of those looked first at the experimenter. Infants in the smile group were more likely to approach and touch the robot than those in the fear group. Infants in the latter group who approached the robot took much longer to make their move than those who had seen a smile; fear-group children also touched the toy for a shorter period of time.

Infants who received smiles showed more positive facial expressions than those who received fear signals. Initial responses to the robot were mostly positive, but the adult's facial reactions of fear still had powerful effects.

There were large individual differences in how children looked at and reacted to the experimenter and the mothers, conclude the researchers, but it is clear that even 1-year-olds are influenced by the emotional signals of relative strangers.