The purpose of the two investigations reported here was to develop a measure of executive capacity, denned as the difference between infants' most sophisticated level of functioning displayed first in free and then in elicited play, and to test several hypotheses regarding the relationship between these performance and competence measures of child functioning and home environment and security of attachment to mother and father. Belsky and 12-step scale of play development was used to assess play; the Caldwell inventory of home stimulation was used to measure home environment; and the Strange Situation was used to assess quality of attachment to mother and father. In Study 1, it was predicted that home environment would relate more systematically to highest level of exploration displayed in free play (called performance) than to executive capacity, and that the home-environment/executive-capacity association would exceed the home-environment/highest-level-of-free-play association. These predictions were confirmed in three distinct samples (12-, 15-, and 18-month-olds). In Study 2 it was predicted that infants evaluated as securely attached to their parents would be more free to attend to the environment beyond the attachment figure in play and thus would display a smaller gap between the most sophisticated play exhibited in free and in elicited play. Data gathered on a large sample of infants at 12 and 13 months provided support for this hypothesis. Discussion focuses on the utility of the executive capacity construct as a measure for studying the effects of early experience and the stability of individual differences between infancy and subsequent developmental periods.Most standardized assessments of infant are designed to assess. We might refer to such functioning involve denning the task for the tests as competency assessments that evaluate child, repeatedly focussing his or her attention the skills that exist in the child's repertoire, on it, and praising and/or encouraging perStudents of language make an important formance. In this way, it is possible that stan-distinction between competence and perfordardized procedures minimize variation in mance, with performance denning the child's children's ability and/or motivation to spon-routine or typical behavior and competence taneously deploy the very skills that such tests denning what the child is theoretically capable of (Chomsky, 1975). The major assumption underlying the two studies to be presented in The work reported in Study 2 was supported by the this article is that, rather than representing a National Science Foundation under Gram SES-810886 methodological problem to be overcome, the and by the March of Dimes Foundation, Behavioral and competence-performance gap may be an exS^Sciences Branch (12-64), Jay Belsky, Principal In-^^ important psychol^g i cal construct o f We would like to thank May Naifeh and Laura Beizer ^ own -We Proposed, more specifically, that for their assistance in data collection in Study i; Rachel the difference between performan...

The purpose of this study was to consider maternal contributions to the development of spontaneous mastery. Thirty infants with cerebral palsy and 31 normally developing infants were videotaped in solitary free play and developmentally assessed at 18 months of age. Mastery behavior was assessed using the spontaneous mastery measure (Hmcir, Speller, & West, 1985) an adaptation of the Belsky and Most (1981) play scale, and scores were calculated from the free play situation. Maternal involvement was observed using the Parent/Caregiver Involvement Scale (PCIS) (Farran, Kasari, Comfort, & Jay, 1986). Mothers' ability to adapt their interactions to the developmental needs of their children was assessed. The results showed that mothers in the two groups did not differ in the quality and appropriateness of interaction with their infants. Matemal involvement scores contributed significantly to both sponanteous mastery and developmental level regardless of risk status. Implications for service providers are to focus their intervention not only on risk factors but also on protective factors, including parental adaptability and competence, that may influence the infant's developmental outcomes.Both Piaget (1952) and White (1959) explained developmental progress in terms of children's attempts to master the environment. White's innovative paper on effectance motivation served as the model for the development of the construct of mastery motivation. He characterized children's focused attention, exploration, and organizational actions toward the environment as reasonable indicators of their motivation. He describes their behavior as selected, directed, and persistent, serving an intrinsic need to cause an effect on the environment.Early studies empirically testing this construct included the work of Harter (1975;Harter & Zigler, 1974), who examined mas-tery motivation in preschoolers versus 10-year-olds as well as motivational behavior in retarded and nonretarded children.Yarrow and his colleagues (Yarrow, Morgan, Jennings, Harmon, & Gaiter, 1982;Yarrow et al., 1983) first attempted to study mastery motivation in infancy. These authors defined mastery motivation as persistence in goaldirected behavior influenced by attention to and interaction with the environment. A common theme in these studies is the importance of environmental influence on the development of mastery motivation. Assessment of mastery occurred both in structured laboratory settings (Jennings,

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