Do infants really have an implicit relational knowing?

This study investigates infants’ signaling behaviors as a strategy to alter mother’s behavior (by eliciting her attention, during a still-face interaction. The focus was to observe whether babies show individualized and unique signaling behavior that reproduces gestures taken from the play-game that mother and baby were co-creating in a play-interaction. These unique eliciting behaviors (UEBs) are coherent and intentional patterns of behavior incorporated into memory and learned by repetition of the play. To investigate unique eliciting behaviors, seventy-eight 24-weeks old and sixty-two 43-weeks old babies were enrolled in the Still-Face Experiment (Tronick et al., 1978). Still face episodes were coded identifying both infants’ general and unique eliciting behaviors. Overall, results showed that UEB might be used with the specific intent to restart a particular play-interaction, during a maternal still-face procedure. However only babies of the 43-weeks old group displayed UEB, and none of 24-weeks old babies did, pointing to age differences between groups. These findings suggest that the acquisition of a game by an infant is possible over time, with repetitions of the game, and the development of specific cognitive, motor and emotional capacities. The infant’s experience of a repeated positive routine game is incorporated into a procedural and implicit relational knowledge, that emerges within the interaction between the mother and her baby. This research contributes to the understanding of implicit relational knowing as a form of procedural knowledge that arises in the interactional processes between baby and caregivers.