Parental Scaffolding of Children’s Prospective Control in a Dynamic Perception-Action Task

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

Abstract

A key challenge for the developing perception-action system is learning how to link decisions and actions tightly in time. For example, crossing roads with continuous traffic involves learning not only how to choose the right gap, but also how to enter the gap at the right time. An important component of linking decisions and actions tightly in time is learning how to exert prospective control (i.e., anticipating an opportunity for action ahead of time). When crossing roads, choosing a traffic gap to cross well ahead of its arrival gives individuals more time to visually monitor the gap and prepare their crossing actions. Here, we describe our work examining how parents scaffold children’s prospective control in a dynamic perception-action task that carries significant safety risks.

We used immersive virtual environment technology to safely and systematically examine how parents and children interact when jointly crossing roads. Parents and 6-, 8-, 10-, and 12-year-old children (N = 64 dyads) stood at the edge of a virtual road and watched continuous traffic traveling from left to right at 25 mph with randomly ordered gaps ranging from 2-5 seconds (Fig. 1). Their task was to decide together which gap to cross and to cross without getting hit. Once they made their decision, they physically walked across the virtual road to the other side.

We found that parents and children used two strategies to communicate their gap choices: 1) a prospective gap communication strategy that included a reference to an upcoming gap (e.g., “How about after the next one?”), and 2) an immediate gap communication strategy that involved crossing the gap without any prior warning (e.g., “Go now!”). Although parents only used a prospective gap communication strategy 30% of the time, greater use of this strategy by parents predicted significantly tighter timing of entry and greater time to spare for children. By alerting children about a crossable gap prior to its arrival, parents gave them more time to prepare their movement into the gap (i.e., get ready to move).

Our current work examines whether we can train parents to use a prospective gap communication strategy and whether use of this strategy impacts how 6-year-olds cross roads with the parent and subsequently cross roads alone. Our preliminary findings (N = 19 dyads) indicate that parents in the training group (M = 85%) were significantly more likely to use the prospective gap communication strategy than parents in the control group (M = 30%). We also found that when the dyads took a gap chosen by the child, children in the training group (M = 84%) were significantly more likely than children in the control group (M = 20%) to use the prospective communication gap strategy themselves even though they were not explicitly taught to use it.

Together, this work contributes to our understanding of the basic experiential mechanisms underlying the development of prospective control in dynamic perception-action tasks and provides preliminary information about parent-based interventions for teaching children how to safely perform perception-action tasks with significant safety consequences.

Authors

• Jodie Plumert, University of Iowa
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth E O'Neal, University of Iowa

• Nam-yoon Kim, University of Iowa