Scaffolding the Emergence of Infant Helping: Experimental and Naturalistic Data

• In Event: 1-092 - Developing Prosociality in the First Year: Precursors and Early Forms of Helping, Sharing, and Empathy

Integrative Statement

Most infants can help others by their first birthday, for instance by handing back out-of-reach objects to adults (Dahl, 2015; Hammond, Al-Jbouri, Edwards, & Feltham, 2017; Sommerville, Schmidt, Yun, & Burns, 2013). What explains this remarkable achievement? One possible contributor to the emergence of infant helping is caregiver scaffolding, including encouragement, praise, and demonstration. Some researchers have proposed that everyday scaffolding is crucial for the early development of helping (Brownell & The Early Social Development Research Lab, 2016; Dahl, 2018). In contrast, others have proposed that caregiver behaviors are not central to the emergence of helping in infancy, but only guide its subsequent development (Warneken, 2016; Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). Recent findings show that adults scaffold infant helping during everyday interactions in the second year, and that scaffolding increases helping early in the second year (Dahl, 2015; Dahl et al., 2017; Waugh et al., 2015). Even among chimpanzees, adults implicitly scaffold infant helping, for instance by demonstrating handing objects (Ueno & Matsuzawa, 2004). However, past research leaves open the question of whether scaffolding is involved in the emergence of helping in the first year.

This presentation discusses naturalistic and experimental findings on whether adult scaffolding contributes to the emergence of infant helping in everyday life around the first birthday. Addressing this question requires both naturalistic research on whether scaffolding occurs in everyday life and experimental research on whether scaffolding increases helping (Dahl, 2017).

Weekly naturalistic observations of parent-infant interactions (N = 28, mean age = 11.8 months) recorded, on average, 1.9 helping-related situations per hour (total = 523). Caregivers scaffolded infant helping in most of these situations, for instance by direct commands (42% of situations, “Hand me that!”), indirect commands (70%, “Do you want to clean up?”), or thanking/praising (32%, “Great job!”). These findings indicate that adult scaffolding is a pervasive feature of helping related situations around the first birthday.

In a longitudinal experiment, infants (N = 50, mean age = 8.5 months) were randomly assigned to a scaffolding condition or a control condition. Infants participated in 10 weekly home visits in which an experimenter (E) built a novel structure. In the scaffolding condition, E provided encouragement, praise, and thanks when infants helped, for instance by handing an out-of-reach building piece to the E. In the control condition infants received no scaffolding. On average, infants in the scaffolding condition handed objects to the experimenter five times as often as infants in the control condition, Poisson Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM): b=1.52, z=3.49, p<.001. During the first visit, 25% of infants handed objects in the control condition vs. 43% of infants who were scaffolded. The effect of scaffolding increased over repeated visits, b=0.17, z=2.08, p=.038 (Figure 1).

These naturalistic and experimental data support the hypothesis that caregiver scaffolding is central to the emergence of helping in the first year of life. The naturalistic findings indicate that caregivers do scaffold infant helping in everyday life, and the longitudinal experimental findings show that scaffolding increases infant helping during the first year.

Authors

• Audun Dahl, University of California Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author

• Caitlyn Grubb, Colorado State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mary Taylor Goeltz, University of California, Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author

• Celia Brownell, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author