Step by step: A microgenetic study of the development of strategy choice in infancy

Abstract

To examine patterns of strategy choice and discovery during problem-solving of a novel locomotor task, 13.5- and 18-month-old infants were placed at the top of a staircase and encouraged to descend. Spontaneous stair descent strategy choices were documented step by step and trial by trial to provide a microgenetic account of problem-solving in action. Younger infants tended to begin each trial walking, were more likely to choose walking with each successive step, and were more likely to lose their balance and have to be rescued by an experimenter. Conversely, older infants tended to begin each trial scooting, were more likely to choose scooting with each successive step, and were more likely to use a handrail to augment balance on stairs. Documenting problem-solving microgenetically across age groups revealed striking similarities between younger infants' strategy development and older children's behaviour on more traditionally cognitive tasks, including using alternative strategies, mapping prior experiences with strategies to a novel task, and strengthening new strategies. As cognitive resources are taxed during a challenging task, resources available for weighing alternatives or inhibiting a well-used strategy are reduced. With increased motor experience, infants can more easily consider alternative strategies and maintain those solutions over the course of the trial.

The process of early self-control: an observational study in two- and three-year-olds

“…The current results suggest that visual attention distraction and hands withholding behaviours may be strategic at this age, if we define strategic behaviour as children's intentional actions aimed at succeeding on a task. A similar meaning was ascribed to the term 'strategic behaviour' in a recent micro-genetic study examining the way in which 13-and 18-month-old infants chose to descend a novel staircase (Berger et al 2015). Following from this definition, we do not consider strategy use to be a fully conscious or metacognitive process at this age, but rather understand the term to mean the way young children approach a task or challenge with the intention of succeeding on that task or mastering that challenge.…”

The Trajectory of Concurrent Motor and Vocal Behaviors Over the Transition to Crawling in Infancy

“…Strikingly, in this study the mean duration of crawling bouts when infants vocalized was shorter than bouts when they did not, despite having more opportunity to do so during long bouts. Longer crawling bouts would have required more effort, particularly for novices, because maintaining an effortful posture is more taxing than reverting to a less demanding one (Berger, ; Berger, Chin, Basra, & Kim, ).…”

Talk the Walk: Does Socio-Cognitive Resource Reallocation Facilitate the Development of Walking?

“…symbolic object use and socio-communication, on walking initiation. Findings suggest that walking initiation is linked to the probability of having attained previous symbolic communicative skills, along with a proactive reallocation of these resources [ 22 , 39 ]. This reallocation possibly serves as a mechanism for preventing over-taxing cognitive resources, thereby affording resource recruitment in order to enable earlier transition [ 40 ] to walking [ 22 , 33 ].…”

“…However little is known about changes in cognitive behaviors that precede and support the emergence of a new motor skill. A novice walker, for example, is required to plan their future movements [ 1 , 22 , 23 ], and thus their strategy choices reflect a need to invest cognitive resources (and the difficulty in doing so) [ 24 , 25 ]. Adolph and collegues [ 26 , 27 ] indicated that novice walking infants are not necessarily considering the relations between their own bodies, their skills and the relevant properties of the environment in deciding if an action such as a descent is possible or impossible [ 24 ], managing at first less challenging terraine better than more complex ones, with the latter resulting in frequent stumbing and falls [ 28 ].…”