title: Investigating looking and social looking measures as an index of infant violation of expectation.
abstract: Accumulated looking time has been widely used to index violation of expectation (VoE) response in young infants. But there is controversy concerning the validity of this measure, with some interpreting infant looking behaviour in terms of perceptual preferences (Cohen & Marks, ; Haith, ). The current study aimed to compare the use of looking time with a recently used measure of social looking (Walden et al., ) in distinguishing between 6-month-old infants' response to novelty/familiarity and a condition in which the object was covertly switched for a different object. Following habituation, infants showed more social looking in response to the object-switch condition than the novel object change, whereas the more commonly used accumulated looking time measure did not distinguish between the two, showing an increase for both. Thus, social looking is a more valid measure of infant VoE than looking time.
authors: Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UK.
authors: Kirsty
authors: K
authors: Dunn
authors: Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UK.
authors: J Gavin
authors: JG
authors: Bremner
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012919:Social Behavior