This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A baby sits on the floor and reaches toward a red ball on the floor and grunts. The mother responds, "Do you see the ball?" She picks it up, holds it in front of the baby and says, "Do you want to hold the ball?" The baby shrieks in excitement as the mother hands the ball to the baby.
Parent-infant interactions, often characterized by direct eye contact and "proto" conversations, have long been thought to be key to infants' sense of their own agency: how infants begin to understand the intentions of people around them and influence them. We all recognize episodes of infants' emerging sense of agency when we see them. Most of the existing evidence is drawn exclusively from middle-class, college-educated mothers and infants of European descent.
There is scant evidence of how infant development unfolds in other cultural contexts and environments. New research published in the journal Infancy reveals how mothers from two distinct communities foster infants' sense of agency. "Pathways to Agency: Cross-Cultural Evidence from Indigenous Wichi and Eurodescendant Caregiver-Infant Interactions" was coauthored by developmental scientists Sandra Waxman of Northwestern University and Migdalia Padilla Colón and Andrea Taverna of Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina.
Working within two distinct Argentine communities—the Indigenous Wichi in the remote Formosa province and Spanish-speaking European descendants in the urban setting of Rosario—the research team videorecorded caregiver-infant interactions beginning when infants were 12 months old and continuing until they were 2.5 years old. Twice daily, they documented naturally occurring interactions, including free play, meals or snacks, physical movement and activity, and engagement with others present. The sites for these recordings were selected by families in each community, reflecting where each community's daily life naturally unfolds.
Wichi families chose to host recordings in outdoor settings near their homes, while city-dwelling European-descendant families chose to host recordings inside their own homes. Then, together with native speakers of each community, the research team identified all episodes of social interaction between caregivers and infants. The review revealed strong commonalities in the mothers' roles in supporting their infants' developing agency.
There were also striking differences. For example, in urban European-descendant families, interactions typically featured two-way attention between mother and infant, most often involving a toy. The exchanges were primarily coordinated with spoken language.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
