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Three experiments were conducted to isolate the effect of touch as a component of mother-infant interaction in the still-face (SF) paradigm and to determine the impact of adult touch on infant affect and attention. In Expt 1 it was established that the amount of maternal touching which occurred during the normal periods of the SF procedure was greater than 65 per cent for 3-, 6-, and 9-month-olds. In Expts 2 (cross-sectional) and 3 (longitudinal), the SF no-touch period was compared with a SF period where mothers could touch their 3to 9-month-olds. Infants who received touch while their mothers were still-faced smiled more, grimaced less, and were more content relative to infants receiving the standard SF, no-touch procedure. Adult touch proved to be an interactive component which, in isolation, reduced the SF effect by eliciting infants' positive affect and directing their attention toward the mothers' hands. The relevance of this work for better comprehension of early infant social interaction and new interpretations of the SF effect are discussed.Recently, face-to-face interactions have been used to study the infant's social communication (Kaye, 1982), emotional expressions and responses to stressful episodes (Field, Vega-Lahr, Scafidi & Goldstein, 1986), and the development of social expectations (Cohn & Tronick, 1983). The investigation of interactions between a mother and her infant permits entry into an intimate dyad where the responses of both partners can be systematically examined. These interactions provide insight into communication patterns and infant cognitive competence. Although mothers usually present their infants with facial, vocal and tactile expressions during normal, free-play, face-to-face interactions, researchers typically analyse maternal facial and vocal behaviours and ignore the mothers' tactile behaviour. Indeed, models of early social interchange derived from such naturalistic

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Adult eye direction was manipulated while adults interacted with 3-6 month-olds over closed-circuit television (Experiment 1) or in person (Experiment 2). Infants received 4 1-min interaction periods. For experimental groups, adult eye contact was maintained during Periods 1 and 3, and averted during Periods 2 and 4 (by viewing infants on a television monitor to maintain contingency). Control infants received eye contact during all periods. Experimental infants' smiling declined whenever adults looked away; their visual attention simply decreased across periods. Control infants showed little change in gaze or smiling across periods. The implications of these results for Baron-Cohen's model of infant theory of mind and Morton and Johnson's 2-process theory of infant face perception are discussed.

In 2 experiments, the majority of 21 newborn infants who were maintained in an alert state consistently turned their heads toward a continuous sound source presented 90 degrees from midline. For most infants this orientation response was rather slow, taking median latencies of 2.5 sec to begin and 5.5 sec to end. The most important factors in producing this impressive response seem to be the method of holding the infants during testing and the nature of the auditory stimulus.

Five experiments examined children's use of eye gaze information for "mind-reading" purposes, specifically, for inferring another person's desire. When presented with static displays in the first 3 experiments, only by 4 years of age did children use another person's eye direction to infer desires, although younger children could identify the person's focus of attention. Further, 3-year-olds were capable of inferring desire from other nonverbal cues, such as pointing (Experiment 3). When eye gaze was presented dynamically with several other scaffolding cues (Experiment 4), 2- and 3-year-olds successfully used eye gaze for desire inference. Scaffolding cues were removed in Experiment 5, and 2- and 3-year-olds still performed above chance in using eye gaze. Results suggest that 2-year-olds are capable of using eye gaze alone to infer about another's desire. The authors propose that the acquisition of the ability to use attentional cues to infer another's mental state may involve both an association process and a differentiation process.

The issue examined was whether infants require sight of their hand when first beginning to reach for, contact, and grasp objects. 7 infants were repeatedly tested between 6 and 25 weeks of age. Each session consisted of 8 trials of objects presented in the light and 8 trials of glowing or sounding objects in complete darkness. Infants first contacted the object in both conditions at comparable ages (mean age for light, 12.3 weeks, and for dark, 11.9 weeks). Infants first grasped the object in the light at 16.0 weeks and in the dark at 14.7 weeks, a nonsignificant difference. Once contact was observed, infants continued to touch and grasp the objects in both light and dark throughout all sessions. Because infants could not see their hand or arm in the dark, their early success in contacting the glowing and sounding objects indicates that proprioceptive cues, not sight of the limb, guided their early reaching. Reaching in the light developed in parallel with reaching in the dark, suggesting that visual guidance of the hand is not necessary to achieve object contact either at the onset of successful reaching or in the succeeding weeks.

3 studies were designed to investigate infant responses to tactile stimulation during brief adult-infant interaction using a modified still-face (SF) procedure. When adults pose a neutral SF expression, infants decrease gazing and smiling at the adults, and some increase grimacing, relative to normal interaction periods. This SF effect was substantially reduced in Study 1 when mothers or strangers continued to touch infants during the SF period. In Studies 2 and 3, tactile versus visual and active versus passive aspects of adult touch were isolated during different SF periods. Visible, active adult hands unaccompanied by touch elicited infant attention, but not smiling, during the SF period. By contrast, active, not passive, adult touch substantially reduced the SF effect, even when the adult's hands were invisible. In the latter condition, infants continued to gaze and smile at the adult's SF. Thus, adult facial expressions are not the only modulator of infant affect and attention during social exchanges; adult touch appears to play an active role.