A recent focus of our Program for the Study of Infancy is the extent to which lab assistants retain fidelity when implementing experimental protocols. Dixon et al. showed that experimenters’ implementations of some aspects of standardized protocols can be influenced by infants’ temperaments. Ellefson and Oppenheimer further found that procedural deviations reduce effect sizes and lead to heterogeneity of findings. In this project, we evaluated archival videos involving experimenters’ implementations of two elicited imitation tasks, “Feed Bear” and “Make a Rattle.” In both tasks, experimenters were assumed to adhere to a narrative script and procedure, which included familiarizing infants with experimental stimuli for 60 seconds prior to infants engaging the tasks. Experimenters were also expected to adhere to a standardized narrative script that accompanied the modeling of “feeding the bear” or “making a rattle.” In this study we explored whether they did so, independent of infants' temperament characteristics. Ten experimenters guided sixty-one 15-month-olds through the experimental procedure. We examined two types of dependent measures reflecting 1) whether experimenters adhered to the 60 second familiarization time protocol, and 2) whether experimenters adhered to the standardized scripts. We also tracked experimenter infant-directed speech (IDS) before the model (prologue IDS) and after the model (epilogue IDS), to see if experimenters’ speech was potentially influenced by infant temperament. Infant temperament was measured by parent-report using the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ). For familiarization times in the Feed Bear task, experimenters granted significantly longer times to the infants than they were supposed to [M = 68.72, SD = 17.14; t(28) = 2.74, p = .011]. But there were no differences among the experimenters in familiarization time. For Make a Rattle, experimenters were on-target with their familiarization times (M = 67.64, SD = 21.38). Infant temperament was not associated with familiarization times in either task. In terms of IDS, experimenters used more words in the standardized narratives of both tasks than they were supposed to [M = 123.90, SD = 18.03; t(28) = 7.73, p M = 109.00, SD = 9.52; t(27) = 15.01, p < .001] respectively. There was no association between IDS during the narrative phase and infant temperament. However, there were associations between infant temperament and IDS during the prologue and epilogue phases; namely for effortful control (prologue r = .29, p p < .05), impulsivity (prologue r = .23, p p
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:asrf-2129 |
| Date | 25 April 2023 |
| Creators | Simpson, Tess A, Dixon, Wallace E, Jr., Guyer, Albany |
| Publisher | Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University |
| Source Sets | East Tennessee State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Appalachian Student Research Forum |
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