Psychology

Early infant interest in their mother's face is driven by an experience based face processing system, and is associated with maternal psychological health, even within a non clinical community sample. The present study examined the role of the voice in eliciting infants’ interest in mother and stranger faces and in the association between infant face interest and maternal psychological health.
Infants aged 3.5-months were shown photographs of their mother's and a stranger's face paired with an audio recording of their mother's and a stranger's voice that was either matched (e.g., mother's face and voice) or mismatched (e.g., mother's face and stranger's voice). Infants spent more time attending to the stranger's matched face and voice than the mother's matched face and voice and the mismatched faces and voices. Thus, infants demonstrated an earlier preference for a stranger's face when given voice information than when the face is presented alone. In the present sample, maternal psychological health varied with 56.7% of mothers reporting mild mood symptoms (depression, anxiety or stress response to childbirth). Infants of mothers with significant mild maternal mood symptoms looked longer at the faces and voices compared to infants of mothers who did not report mild maternal mood symptoms. In sum, infants’ experience based face processing system is sensitive to their mothers’ maternal psychological health and the multimodal nature of faces.

In the present study, eye tracker methodology was used to explore whether there were age-related changes in the focus of infant attention during a learning
event and subsequent recognition memory for event features. Six- and 9-month old infants watched a video of an adult demonstrating a sequence of actions
with an object while visual attention was recorded using an eye tracker. At both ages, attention was focused primarily on the object and person, with the
background attended to for approximately 12% of their viewing time. Recognition memory for the person, object and background from the video was
assessed immediately using a Visual Paired Comparison procedure. Despite focusing on the central features while watching the target video, infants
showed only limited evidence of recognition memory for the individual components of the event. Taken together, these findings suggest that the early
age-related changes in memory performance seen in the literature may not be the result of age-related changes in attentional focus during encoding.

The provision of verbal labels enhances 12-month-old infants’ memory flexibility across a form change in a puppet imitation task (Herbert, 2011), although the mechanisms for this effect remain unclear. Here we investigate whether verbal labels can scaffold flexible memory retrieval when task difficulty increases and consider the mechanism responsible for the effect of language cues on early memory flexibility. Twelve-month-old infants were provided with English, Chinese, or empty language cues during a difficult imitation task, a combined change in the puppet’s colour and form at the test (Hayne et al., 1997). Imitation performance by infants in the English language condition only exceeded baseline performance after the 10-min delay. Thus, verbal labels facilitated flexible memory retrieval on this task. There were no correlations between infants’ language comprehension and imitation performance. Thus, it is likely that verbal labels facilitate both attention and categorisation during encoding and retrieval.

Early work in conversation analysis focused on openings in telephone conversations, and it was found that openings were composed of four sequences: 1) a summons-answer sequence; 2) a greeting sequence; 3) an identification-recognition sequence; and 4) a how are you sequence (Schegloff, 1968).  While not all of these components were present in every telephone opening, there was always an opening sequence in before the first topic was initiated. The opening sequence of any conversation does relational work between participants and equally enables us to see something about the relationship between the participants. In this paper, it will be shown how openings in quasi-synchronous chats vary from the canonical telephone opening sequence. A corpus of openings from chats between intimates using the Facebook chat facility will be used in order to highlight some of the differences in opening sequences, and how these further highlight the relationship between participants. The specific focus will be on the initial sequence which always occurs in a telephone call – the summons-answer adjacency pair. It will be shown how this particular sequence can be conflated with the other sequences, such as the greeting sequence or the topic initiation. Secondly, it will be shown how in Facebook chat the summons can be recipient designed, and how the technological affordances of the medium enable this. Finally, it will be shown how the summons can also do relational work between the participants, and enable us to understand the relationship between participants, merely from the opening turn.

This paper will focus on the initiation of first topic in one-to-one online instant messaging interactions.  There has been much discursive research which focuses on how participants initiate first topic in spoken conversations (e.g. Button & Casey, 1985; Maynard & Zimmerman, 1984). This research has found that in telephone openings there is an ‘anchor position’ in an interactional opening where the first topic or ‘reason for the call’ can be initiated (Schegloff, 1986). Studies have also focused on how topical sequences are generated (Button & Casey, 1985), and on the discursive markers used to indicate a topic-initiation (e.g.  Bolden, 2008). This paper seeks to further this research by examining topic-initiation in online, written interactions. Thus, interactions which have been conducted using Facebook ‘chat’ have been collected and analyzed using conversation analysis. This data will be used to discuss whether the structural differences between online interactions and telephone interactions have led to empirical differences in how participants initiate first topic. I will discuss, firstly, how first topic can be initiated in the first turn of the interaction, and simultaneously function as a summons. Secondly, I will discuss how such first-turn topic-initiators are designed by participants, and how these compare to findings from previous studies on spoken interaction. Finally, I will show how the topic-relevant sequence which such an opening move engenders is subsequently organized.

I will present some preliminary findings of my research into the ways in which people interact online, and how these are similar to and different from spoken interaction.  While there are many media through which people interact online, my research focuses on online forums and instant messaging. One might intuit that such interactions are far removed from spoken conversation, but I will show that, in some cases, the same interactional contingencies are handled in both off- and online environments. Through the analysis of postings from an online forum, I will discuss these contingencies and how they are significant for the different actions which can be achieved in online postings. However, there are also differences between spoken and online interaction, and I will discuss how the affordances of an online forum allow for practices to have evolved which have no corresponding practice in spoken conversation. Finally, I will show some examples of Facebook ‘chats’ between friends and discuss the potential relevance of this for my analysis.

The aim of this paper is to show how conversation analysis – a method devised for spoken interaction – can be used to analyze online interaction. The specific focus of this presentation will be on demonstrating how the impact of the design features, or affordances, of an online medium can be analyzed using conversation analysis. I will use examples from a corpus of 75 one-to-one Facebook ‘chats’, collected using screen capture software, which I argue can provide us with additional information about participants’ real-time, lived experiences of online interaction.  Through examining a number of interactional practices found in my data corpus, I will show how the analysis of real-life examples of online interaction can provide us with insights in to how participants adapt their interactional practices to suit the affordances of the medium. While the majority of the presentation will focus on Facebook chat I will also discuss, briefly, how similar data collection and analytic methods could be extended to other social media.

This paper examines the practice of self-initiated self-repair in online written interaction, and compares it to repair in spoken talk. The data comprises one-to-one quasi-synchronous Facebook chats, collected using screen capture software. We describe self-initiated self-repair as it occurs both during the visible chat and also during the writer’s construction of the chat message. We will show, firstly, that some repair operations are visible to both the writer and the recipient. These most often correct typing errors, which may be relevant to the recipient’s understanding of the message. However, self-repairs also occur during message construction, and are not visible to the recipient. We will show that these self-repairs correspond to those in spoken interaction, both in terms of design, organization and component features, and in terms of their interactional function to construct action, display stance, and, overall, to maintain intersubjectivity. However, in contrast to spoken interaction, writers are able to ‘hide’ these repairs from their recipients. The paper will therefore argue that participants in online written interaction have adapted spoken interactional practices, making use of the technological affordances of the medium, in order to conduct repair operations which are not available for the recipient.

Previous research on the conversation analytic phenomenon of ‘repair’ has focused on its design and function in spoken interaction. Conversely, research on written text rarely treats it as interaction. In this paper, we examine repair in written discourse; specifically in online settings. The data corpus comprises one-to-one quasi-synchronous Facebook ‘chat’. First, we show that, as in spoken interaction, repair happens. This basic observation supports conversation analytic arguments that features of talk, like repair and laughter, do not ‘leak’ into interaction but are precision-timed and designed to accomplish action. Second, we report on two types of repair: visible repair which can be seen and oriented to by both participants in the interaction, and message construction repair, which is available only to the message’s writer. While the practice of message construction repair is made possible through the affordances of the online medium, it nevertheless shows how participants in written interaction are oriented to the same basic contingencies of building sequentially organized courses of action and maintaining intersubjectivity. We suggest that assumptions about differences between spoken and online interaction are premature. Rather, we argue that online interaction should be treated as an adaptation of an oral speech-exchange system.

This chapter explores how to use conversation analysis and discursive psychology for the analysis of online data. It investigates the challenges of analysing online data and, using examples from online forum and instant messaging data, demonstrates how these methods can illuminate participants’ interactional practices in the context of particular technological affordances.