Infant-caregiver Interactions in Tajikistan: Social Information Seeking and Object Exploration During a Structured Task

• In Event: Broadening the Lens on Parent-Child Interaction as a Mechanism of Developmental Change in Children’s Skills

Abstract

Social understanding—infants' ability to look to others in situations of uncertainty or challenge—emerges between 12 to 18 months. Examining social information-seeking while engaging with novel toys is particularly interesting because interactions with objects involve perception, action, and cognition. During visual-manual interactions, infants learn about the properties of objects and their functions, and use their manual skills to implement the designed actions (e.g., sorting shapes). Incorporating caregivers into object engagements creates conditions for language learning as mothers are likely to label actions and objects infants are holding. Evidence for social understanding and object exploration come primarily from studies of infants and mothers from Western childrearing traditions, which emphasize abundant opportunities to move, explore, and interact. Environments abound with objects. Caregivers provide the setting for play and scaffold object engagement.

In Tajikistan, the environment and childrearing practices offer alternate opportunities for toy exploration and adult feedback, potentially affecting infants' social information-seeking and object behaviors. Notably, caregivers contain infants in a gahvora cradle for hours, restricting infants' spontaneous movement, which results in motor lags. With age, the practice of cradling is reduced, expanding opportunities for movement and exploration, but early cradling may have enduring effects on infants' willingness to explore novel objects and discover their properties and functions. The environment also is toy-scarce; objects are available but lack complexity and diversity. Adults and peers are always present, providing an environment rich with social information.

We asked whether Tajik infants show similar gains in social information-seeking comparable to Western counterparts and whether they attempt to discover the functions of objects and successfully implement actions. We observed 121 Tajik infant-mother dyads longitudinally during a shape-sorting task at 12, 16, and 20 months and coded the frequency of infant social bids and attempts to fit shapes during the 3-minute task. We expected that, given the unique opportunities for motor, object, and social interactions for Tajik infants, social bidding may be frequent at all ages or attenuate with age as success to sort improves. We found that infants’ bids were infrequent but increased with age suggesting that infants might see their caregiver as a useful source of information. Success at sorting also improved by 16 and 20 months but attempts were rare at 12 months. Currently, we are scoring infants’ exploratory behaviors—mouthing, banging, fingering, rotating, and transferring—as means for infants to discover object properties on the way to successful sorting. We hypothesize that frequency and type of exploratory behaviors at 12 months will predict successful attempts at sorting at later ages. Exploration may also mediate the relation between social bidding and successful attempts. Infants who explore and bid more frequently—using perceptual information that is self-generated and soliciting social information—may show increases in successful attempts to sort at 20 months relative to infants who explore and bid less often.

This study provides a potentially promising avenue for investigating intersections among culture, perceptual-motor, and social cognitive development in a sample typically underrepresented in developmental literature.

Authors

• Lana Karasik, City University of New York College of Staten Island
  Presenting Author

• Hasibe Melda Kahraman-Colosky, CUNY Graduate Center

• Alexa Ferst, City University of New York