Buds in Bloom: Infants’ Social Referencing for Flowers

Previous literature has established that young children and adults react differently to different flower characteristics. Specifically, they prefer radially symmetrical flowers and magenta colored flowers. This study investigates how infants respond to plants with flowers. We present infants with 24 stimuli, including artificial plants with flowers, artificial plants without flowers, and feature-matched novel artifacts. The flowers were either bilaterally or radially symmetrical, and were white, yellow, or magenta. We analyze infants’ social referencing behavior, an indication of information seeking, measured by the time infants spent looking at the experimenter or the parent directly following a look to the stimuli. We predict that infants will show more social looking when presented with the plants with flowers than for the novel artifacts. We also predict that infants will exhibit more social looking when presented with flowers with non-preferred characteristics.