Infants are highly social and much of 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 childrens' performance. Here we ask whether infants' success on an object search task is more strongly influenced by dynamic changes in maternal responsive behaviour, or by fluctuations in infants' own internal motivation 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 motivation (engagement; visual attention) were assessed. Mothers varied their task delivery significantly in response to their infants’ behaviour, as maternal teaching durations were extended when infants offered less visual attention. However, 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 motivation 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.
Do helpful mothers help? Effects of maternal scaffolding and infant motivation on cognitive performance
