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. 2025 Jul 22.
doi: 10.1111/cdev.70012. Online ahead of print.

The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-To-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction

Tess Allegra Forest  1 , Layla Bradford  2 , Lorna Ginnell  3   4 , Maroussia Berger  1 , Donna Herr  2 , Emmie Mbale  3   5 , Kavindya Dalawella  1 , Chloë A Jacobs  2 , Chikondi Mchazime  3 , Celia D'Amato  1 , Zamazimba Madi  2 , Pious Clifford Mkaka  3 , Claudia Espinoza-Heredia  1 , Tembeka Mhlakwaphalwa  2 , Vukiwe Ngoma  3 , Monique Gilmore  1 , Marlie Miles  2 , Jinge Ren  1 , Nwabisa Mlandu  2 , Reese Samuels  2 , Michal R Zieff  2 , Melissa Gladstone  6 , Kirsten A Donald  2 , Dima Amso  1
Affiliations

The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-To-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction

Tess Allegra Forest et al. Child Dev. .

Abstract

Cognitive development is associated with how predictable caregivers are, but the mechanisms driving this are unclear. One possibility is caregiver predictability initially shapes how infants gather information for learning. Here, caregiver-infant dyads (N = 222, 2-6-months-old, all female caregivers; data collected 2022-2023) in South Africa and Malawi engaged in naturalistic play before their interactions were hand-annotated to measure caregiver predictability and infant gaze. In both countries, temporal variation in caregiver predictability shaped infant looking dynamics-infants attended to specific sensory signals (η2 = 0.04) and specific timepoints (η2 = 0.10) that were useful for them based on their caregiver's typical behavior. These findings provide a framework by which the predictability of caregiver behavior may shape fundamental, early optimization of visual attention for learning in infancy and later cognitive development.

Keywords: attention; child development; early environment; infancy; learning; non‐western populations.

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