Date on Senior Honors Thesis

5-2022

Document Type

Senior Honors Thesis

Degree Name

B.S.

Department

Psychological and Brain Sciences

Degree Program

College of Arts and Sciences

Author's Keywords

infant learning; Sticky Mittens; causal perception; object contact

Abstract

The Sticky Mittens (SM) paradigm is an object manipulation task that provides infants the opportunity to explore objects through active experience before they have the necessary motor skills to do so on their own. Positive cognitive outcomes like increased attention to objects, object engagement, object exploration, and causal perception have been shown to result from active SM experience (Libertus & Needham, 2010; Rakison & Krogh, 2012). Researchers are interested in understanding which aspects of SM training are important for infant learning. Although there have been many SM studies looking at different variables, such as active vs. passive experience and parent encouragement, the role of infant contact with the toys has received little focus. The present study investigates the role of infant contact with toys during the SM experience. Holt (2016) investigated the effects of active vs. passive SM experience and parent encouragement vs. no parent encouragement on infants’ learning and found that infants in the active, no parent encouragement group exhibited causal perception whereas infants in the active, parent encouragement condition did not. The present study includes a secondary analysis of Holt (2016), comparing infants’ physical contact during the active SM sessions. I hypothesized that infants in the active, no parent encouragement condition exhibited causal perception due to a longer duration of physical contact with the toys. Videos from Holt’s (2016) active, parent encouragement and active, no parent encouragement conditions were coded to compare the overall proportion of object contact across conditions. No difference was found between the two conditions for proportion of object contact, suggesting that other factors in the SM training led to infants’ learning.

Lay Summary

The Sticky Mittens (SM) paradigm is an object manipulation task that provides infants the opportunity to explore objects through active experience before they have the necessary motor skills to do so on their own. Active SM experience has been shown to facilitate positive cognitive outcomes for infants such as increased attention to objects, object engagement, object exploration, and causal perception. There have been may SM studies looking at different variables like active vs. passive experience and parent encouragement, but the role of infant contact with toys on infant learning has received little focus. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of infant contact with toys in infant learning during the SM experience. The present study includes a secondary analysis of videos from Holt’s (2016) active, parent encouragement and active, no parent encouragement conditions comparing infants’ physical contact during the SM sessions. No difference was found between the two conditions for proportion of object contact, suggesting that other factors in the SM training led to infants’ learning.

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