If looks could talk: Threat and familiarity influence with whom and how infants interact in ambiguous situations

Abstract

We investigated how apparent threat of an ambiguous stimuli modulates infants’ looking to interaction partners of varying familiarity (mother, familiar experimenter, unfamiliar experimenter). We hypothesized a preference for familiar informants under higher apparent threat, but a preference for unfamiliar informants under lower apparent threat. The informant encouraged infants (N = 104, 8–13 months) to cross a visual cliff in one of two apparent threat conditions (lower vs. higher drop‐off). Under lower threat, infants looked equally long to all informants, but switched gazes more often between their mother and the cliff. Infants explored the cliff more and crossed more often in the mother condition compared to the other two conditions. They also expressed less negative affect in the presence of the mother compared to the unfamiliar experimenter, but not compared to the familiar experimenter. Under high threat, a similar pattern emerged, except that looking duration to the unfamiliar informant was shorter compared to the low threat condition. Heart rate acceleration appeared when infants were placed on the cliff compared to a baseline phase. Higher levels of negative affectivity (but not higher arousal) were observed under higher compared to lower threat. Overall, we found little evidence of the influence of threat within the visual cliff task. We argue that infants may have perceived the cliff as quite challenging even in the lower threat condition and call for more research on the situational embeddedness of early social learning processes.