Infant Memory for Emotion Experienced in a Social Referencing Paradigm

RM 215

Through social referencing, infants are able to use others’ emotions to guide their behavior during a novel situation. Although social referencing is a powerful tool to guide future behavior, few investigations have examined long-term changes in behavior and memory for emotions learned in social referencing experience. In the present investigation, we examine 9-15-month-olds’ visual and overt behaviors for evidence of memory for emotion information acquired in a social referencing experience. Participants are seated in front of a computer and shown pre-recorded video clips of an experimenter who expresses facial and verbal emotion (positive or negative) toward one of two novel objects. Eye-tracking software is used to measure infants’ gaze durations and eye-movements toward the novel objects and face of the experimenter. After a delay (ranging from no delay to 30 minutes), the two objects are placed in front of the participant to allow them to interact with the object. Participants’ visual and overt behaviors to the objects are video recorded. Current findings indicate that during encoding (i.e., during the social referencing demonstration), children pay more attention to the face of the emoter during the negative condition than in other conditions. Further, infants give more attention to the object during the positive condition than in other conditions. Additional analyses will examine how attention during encoding relates to visual and overt behaviors after a delay to assess patterns of emotional memory. Results from this study will further enhance understanding of ontogeny of emotional memory in early childhood.