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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

A fundamental issue in the field of cognitive development is understanding the experiential mechanisms that underlie developmental changes in children’s skills. This symposium explores the role of parent-child interaction as a mechanism of developmental change across a broad array of domains, cultures, and populations. The first presentation provides a rare glimpse into parent-child interaction in a non-Western culture, focusing on how Tajik infants make social bids of caregivers when engaging in a challenging shape-sorting task and whether caregivers’ responses to these bids predict infants’ success in the task. The second presentation examines on how parents and children negotiate referential pacts (temporary agreement on referent names) during a communication game involving novel objects, highlighting the importance of parent-child interaction as a potential bridge to successful referential communication with peers. The third presentation focuses on how parents’ strategies for helping their children fit puzzle pieces together differentially impact the success of term and preterm preschoolers. This work shows that structure provided by parents is more critical for successful performance in preterm than term children. The final presentation examines how parents help children develop prospective control over action (i.e., anticipating when to act) in a dynamic perception-action task (crossing virtual roads with continuous traffic). This work underscores the importance of parental guidance in perception-action tasks that carry significant safety risks. Together, these presentations show how parent-child interaction operates as a mechanism of change in the moment and over time as infants and children develop a broad array of skills critical for everyday functioning.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Jodie Plumert, University of Iowa

Individual Presentations

• Infant-caregiver Interactions in Tajikistan: Social Information Seeking and Object Exploration During a Structured Task - Presenting Author: Lana Karasik, City University of New York College of Staten Island; Hasibe Melda Kahraman-Colosky, CUNY Graduate Center; Alexa Ferst, City University of New York

• The Role of Parental Scaffolding in Children’s Referential Pact Formation - Presenting Author: Ashley Leung, University of Chicago; Robert D. Hawkins, Princeton University; Daniel Yurovsky, Carnegie Mellon University

• Parental Scaffolding of Puzzle Play in Preterm and Term Preschoolers: Differential Role of Strategy Use - Presenting Author: Ece Demir-Lira, University of Iowa; Raquel Gomez, University of Iowa; Isabel Goetz, University of Iowa; Tilbe Göksun, Koç University

• Parental Scaffolding of Children’s Prospective Control in a Dynamic Perception-Action Task - Presenting Author: Jodie Plumert, University of Iowa; Elizabeth E O'Neal, University of Iowa; Nam-yoon Kim, University of Iowa