The effect of play task on maternal touch patterns when interacting with their 12 months-old infants: An exploratory study

Abstract Multiple studies have demonstrated the critical role of touch in human development and the impact of mother’s tactile input for an infant’s well-being. However, the literature lacks a detailed description of maternal touch behavior during play tasks. Our study examined maternal touch patterns during mother-infant interactions. We analyzed the touch behavior of 41 mothers while they interacted with their 12-month-old infants, in a structured social interaction, composed of three tasks: (1) free play with toys, (2) free play without toys, and (3) object play with a challenging toy. Every touch performed by the mother was segmented and categorized using the Ordinalized Mother Touch Scale (OMTS Category). In a 3 (Play Task) x 8 (OMTS Category) ANOVA, all effects were significant. We found that, in the free play without toys task, mother’s use of touch is highly frequent (M = 71 %), when compared to object-oriented tasks. Mothers also adjusted to object-oriented task difficulty: they touched almost twice as much in the challenging play task as in the free play with toys (M = 26 % vs. M = 14 %). In addition, the different play tasks influenced the proportion of time mothers used particular categories of touch. In summary, our study found that mothers’ touch behavior depends on the play task demands (non-object oriented vs. object oriented) changing in terms of frequency but also in the mother’s use of different categories of touch.