Cascading Effects of Parental Behavior on Infant Attention during Joint Play

• In Event: Cascading Consequences of Object Play on Cognition

Abstract

A significant body of work has demonstrated the important role parents play in directing infant cognition and development. Flom and Pick (2007) emphasize a parent’s ability to accurately capture infant attention as the foundation of joint attention. Dyadic play interactions have been found to be an important mechanism for the emergence of later cognitive processes and better attentional control in young children (Lawson, Parrinello & Ruff, 1992; Landry & Chapieski, 1988). Recent work has revealed that caregivers and infants structure play moment-to-moment by shifting their interactions and behaviors based on the actions and vocalizations of their partner (Yu & Smith, Deak).

In the present study, we examined the cascading effects of parental behavior on play in 6-month-old infants. The aim of this work is to understand how parents shape infant behavior over time, and how infants respond to these scaffolding behaviors. The existing work on the dynamics of parent-infant play, and how parent behavior shapes infant attention and learning, has primarily focused on toddlers (Suanda, Smith & Yu, 2016; Custode & Tamis-LeMonde, 2020). The present work extends this previous work by examining the connection between parental behavior during play and infant attention, in the form of touching toys during play. We recorded 89 infants (M = 188.32 days, SD = 6.04; 47 boys) during two 90-s play sessions, separated by 15 minutes of unrelated activities. For each session, infants were randomly assigned to either joint play with their mother or solo play. This resulted in four groups of children (joint/solo, joint/joint, solo/joint, solo/solo).

During all play sessions, infants were seated in a bumbo chair and four toys were presented on the tray: a box toy, ring toy, dog toy, and worm toy. We used Datavyu to code both infant and parent touching of the toys. This yielded a record of the frequency and duration of touching to each toy. We also coded parental vocalizations. Preliminary analyses revealed that while playing alone, infants touched the box toy more than the other three toys (see Fig 1). When playing with their mother, infants’ touching was more evenly distributed across all toys. These were not only concurrent effects (i.e., differences in how children touched the toys while playing with their mother or while playing alone), but playing with a parent also influenced infants’ toy preferences in subsequent play sessions. Other analyses indicate that infants touching specific toys is related to parental concurrent vocalization of those toys. Ongoing analyses are investigating more nuanced connections between infant and parent behavior in these sessions, with an eye to identifying how parental behavior sets the stage for infant’s engagement with toys.

Authors

• Christian M Harms, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Lisa M Oakes, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author