Video versus reality: Infants' attention and affective responses to video and live presentations

Television viewing by infants has become very common, vet relatively little is known about infants' reactions to video compared to live events. We conducted two experiments in order to compare 9- or 10-month-old infants' behavioral reactions to live events and video presentations of those events. In the first experiment, infants were shown video and live presentations shown consecutively; their affective reactions were consistent; indicating that video conveys meaning and emotional impact even in infancy. However infants generally looked longer at; reached more to, showed more interest in, and exhibited snore dear to the real stimuli. In a second experiment, infants were shown identical live and video events simultaneously: they looked much longer at the live presentations further confirming that then distinguished live events from video and preferred to watch real events. Implications for infants' television viewing and the use of video images in infancy research are discussed.