Technoference in Parenting: Parental Smartphone Use Affects Infants’ Object Learning

With the global increase in smartphone use, parental technoference – disruptions in parent-child interactions due to digital devices – has been shown to negatively impact children’s development, particularly on parental responsiveness and children’s emotional wellbeing. The current study is the first to investigate the real-time effects of parental smartphone use on 9-month-old infants’ object learning during live interactions. Using head-mounted eye trackers, N= 21 infant-caregiver dyads engaged with novel toy objects in two conditions (familiarisation phase): a Joint-Attention (JA) condition, where caregivers introduced objects while engaging in joint attention with the infant, and a Smartphone (SP) condition, where caregivers introduced objects without looking at the infant but instead watching videos on a smartphone. Immediately after each condition (recognition phase), infants’ object recognition was assessed through a preferential looking test, where a familiarised object was presented side by side with a novel object. Prior to the interactions, caregivers completed the Mobile Phone Involvement Questionnaire. During the familiarisation phase infants showed no difference in total looking time at objects between conditions. In the recognition phase, while in the JA condition infants showed a familiarity preference for the previously seen object, in the SP condition they did not show any preference for either object, and this difference between conditions was significant. Interestingly, the parental-reported mobile phone use scores did not predict infants’ object recognition performance. These findings underscore the negative impact of parenting technoference on infants’ object learning, highlighting the need for further research into how technoference influences early learning processes.