CONTINGENCY EFFECTS OF PEOPLE AND OBJECTS ON SUBSEQUENT COGNITIVE-FUNCTIONING IN 3-MONTH-OLD INFANTS

Three month-old infants' responses to persons and objects who interact ed with the infant at two levels of contingency were contrasted in two experiments. In experiment 1, contingent responding of people and obj ects was controlled In experiment 2, the facial/vocal dynamics were co ntrolled as well as contingent responding. In both experiments, contin gent interaction had different effects on infants depending on whether the 'actor' was a person or an object. In addition, the contingency a nd person/object variables influenced infants' states of attention to a nonsocial stimulus on subsequent transfer tasks. Specifically, infan ts who experienced contingent interactions with people exhibited posit ive affect and exposed themselves to subsequent higher levels of stimu lation than infants who experienced noncontingent interactions with pe ople. These infants exhibited negative affective states and exposed th emselves to very low levels of subsequent stimulation. In contrast, in fants who experienced contingent and noncontingent interactions with o bjects did not show such variation in emotional expressions. Instead t hey produced primarily neutral facial expressions in all conditions an d did not show very high nor very low levels of interest for the multi -modal stimulus on the subsequent transfer tasks. The discussion cente rs on the mechanism that allow infants to discriminate between conting encies provided by people and objects and that drive the results obtai ned on the transfer tasks.