Do Helpful Mothers Help? Effects of Maternal Scaffolding and Infant Engagement on Cognitive Performance.

Kaili Clackson,Harriet Almond,Rebecca Nutbrown,Stanimira Georgieva,Sam Wass,Giulia Carro,Brier Rigby Dames,Julia Bieluczyk,Victoria Leong,Laura Brightman

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02661

Kaili Clackson, Harriet Almond + Show 8 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02661

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Abstract

Infants are highly social and much early learning takes place in a social context during interactions with caregivers. Previous research shows that social scaffolding – responsive parenting and joint attention – can confer benefits for infants’ long-term development and learning. However, little previous research has examined whether dynamic (moment-to-moment) adaptations in adults’ social scaffolding are able to produce immediate effects on infants’ performance. Here we ask whether infants’ success on an object search task is more strongly influenced by maternal behavior, including dynamic changes in response behavior, or by fluctuations in infants’ own engagement levels. Thirty-five mother-infant dyads (infants aged 10.8 months, on average) participated in an object search task that was delivered in a naturalistic manner by the child’s mother. Measures of maternal responsiveness (teaching duration; sensitivity) and infant engagement (engagement score; visual attention) were assessed. Mothers varied their task delivery trial by trial, but neither measure of maternal responsiveness significantly predicted infants’ success in performing the search task. Rather, infants’ own level of engagement was the sole significant predictor of accuracy. These results indicate that while parental scaffolding is offered spontaneously (and is undoubtedly crucial for development), in this context children’s endogenous engagement proved to be a more powerful determinant of task success. Future work should explore this interplay between parental and child-internal factors in other learning and social contexts.

Highlights

Finding a hidden object involves a number of cognitive processes which develop significantly during the first year of life – including the ability to pay attention to the object as it is hidden, to remember where it is stored while it cannot be seen, and to inhibit the urge to perseverate in reaching to a previously stored location (Munakata, 1998)
We investigate how infants perform on an object search task when it is embedded in a naturalistic social context, such as a game between mother and infant
Prior to analysis of the data, 9 trials were excluded where the infant paid no attention to the task at all as behavior on these trials would not reflect processes related to object search

Summary

Introduction

Finding a hidden object involves a number of cognitive processes which develop significantly during the first year of life – including the ability to pay attention to the object as it is hidden, to remember where it is stored while it cannot be seen, and to inhibit the urge to perseverate in reaching to a previously stored location (Munakata, 1998) For this reason, hiding and finding games such as the A-not-B task and variants thereof have been extensively used by developmental psychologists to measure the development of executive functions The remainder of the introduction examines how research in different areas of infant development predicts differing answers to this question

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