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

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.

Automatic analysis of infant engagement during play: An end-to-end learning and Explainable AI pilot experiment

“…Task engagement has also been studied in-depth in the context of infant development. Infant engagement has been shown to correlate with cognitive performance [6], and is an active area of research. Studies on infant engagement typically rely on manual annotation of videos, where domain experts make subjective judgements based on features such as positive emotion, gaze direction, and goaldirected movements.…”

Medidas observacionales para evaluar la responsividad parental: una revisión sistemática.

“…Parental responsiveness is considered as one of the parenting components with the greatest influence on child development (Bornstein et al, 2008;De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997), in areas as diverse as neurological (Bernier et al, 2018), socio-emotional (Van Huisstede et al, 2019), cognitive (Clackson, et al, 2019;Spruijt et al, 2019), or linguistic development (Prime et al, 2019). The evaluation of parental responsiveness began with the first observational works by Ainsworth (1967, cited by Ainsworth et al, 1978.…”

Assessing effects of social interaction on early development of executive function in infants

“…Successful performance on the task by older children follows the emergence of executive function precursor skills, including the inhibition of previously learned responses, flexible shifting of attention and goals, and updating working memory for location changes. The materials used in this protocol follow closely from a published EEG-compatible version of the task where mothers performed the task with their infants (Clackson et al, 2019). The trials were developed based on adaptations from past studies and papers.…”

“…Infants are exposed to new and unfamiliar environments from the moment that they are born. Social scaffolding of relevant information by infant's caregivers or social partners is one efficient way for infants to learn about the world and the life skills required to navigate new environments (Clackson et al, 2019;Neale & Whitebread, 2019). Specifically, infants learn from the observation of the behaviour and through social interactions with their social partners (Csibra & Gergely, 2011).…”

“…Most early learning experiences occur in social contexts such as interactions with maternal caregivers. Many studies have investigated the effects of maternal teaching and infant's task performances (Clackson et al, 2019) or to scaffold infant's attention patterns to aid learning (Bibok et al, 2009;Wass et al, 2018) and development of executive processes such as visual-spatial processing (Dilworth-Bart et al, 2010). However, to the best of our knowledge, little previous research has been done to directly compare the effects of maternal scaffolding and stranger's scaffolding on infant's learning.…”