UMass Boston

The Infant Social-Referencing Study measures how infants respond to seeing and hearing their mothers' and strangers' (research assistants) interactions with one another. These brief mother-stranger interactions will be positive or negative, similar to what might happen on an everyday basis. We are also looking at how the infants respond to the strangers they observed in friendly play activity that the strangers will initiate. 

Studying the effects of mother-stranger interactions on infants is important because it will increase our understanding of how infants learn to socially interact with new people they encounter on an everyday basis and how infants begin to remember social events.

This particular study is under the direction of Karim Afzal.