Children’s sensitivity to eyebrow flash as an ostensive stimulus: a pilot study

Abstract

Ostensive signals are an integral part of normal everyday communication, a body of evidence indicates that some of them are innately recognizable to infants. The eyebrow flash has been suggested to be an ostensive signal by authors of human ethology studies. This have been shown little attention in the psychological field, this pilot study therefore has as goal of setting the basis for studying young children’s sensitivity to the eyebrow flash in a systematic way. And aims to identify if children between the ages 6 to 18 months old prefer to look at an intended ostensive stimulus over a matched distractor stimulus in a preferential looking paradigm. The results revealed a non-significant preference towards the intended ostensive stimulus. One of five exploratory analysis showed a tendency towards a significant preference for the intended ostensive stimulus in the last test trial when compared to chance, but when adjusting with the Bonferroni correction this finding were no longer significant. Six potential reasons for the non-significant results are discussed in the final section of this paper as well as suggestions on how to possibly address those problems in later studies.