Mother-infant relationships in baboons (Papio hamadryas): predictors of differences and discontinuities in developmental pathways

This study uses hierarchical linear regression modeling to analyze sources of variation in the developmental pathways of mother-infant relationships and to search for behavioral discontinuities. The data come from 23 mother-infant dyads of baboons (Papio hamadryas), whose interactions were recorded longitudinally during the infants' 1st year of life. The infant's sex and the mother's age and reproductive experience accounted for part of the variation observed in the developmental pathways of 11 of 20 behavioral measures analyzed; however, some of them did so only in some periods but not in others. The authors proposed that this can reflect the occurrence of reorganizations or discontinuities in the mother-infant relationship that can be related to important life events such as the mother's resumption of sexual activity.