Search

Combining the joint attention approaches of Mundy and colleagues' (2007) experimental coding of infants' specific initiating and responding acts and of Bakeman and Adamson's (1986) descriptions of both infants' and mothers' behaviors during joint engagement, this study examined 29 infants' and mothers' initiatives and responses leading to success in achieving joint attention (JA) episodes during naturalistic interactions when infants were 13 and 17 months old. Analyses revealed developmental changes in initiative frequencies and in the origins of JA episodes. At 13 months, although infants' less sophisticated object-only initiatives (IObj) were most frequent, JA episodes most often originated in maternal combined initiatives (IJA), which focused on both object and partner. By 17 months, however, infants' combined initiatives were most frequent and led to more JA episodes than any other initiative type. Infants with more combined initiatives achieved more JA episodes at both ages and greater 17-month vocabularies.

Mother–infant interactions are important to infant development because they are predictive of infants’ social, cognitive, and language development (Lamb, Bornstein, & Teti, 2002; Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, & Baumwell, 2001). Because maternal responsive and directive behaviors are associated with differential infant outcomes, it is important to investigate influences on mothers’ provision of responsive and directive behaviors. Yet, the dyadic interaction literature is predominantly unidirectional from maternal behavior to infant outcomes. Therefore, the current study examined infant initiating behaviors and consequent maternal responses in a sample of 26 13-month-old infants and their mothers, videotaped during 5 min of free-play. Findings revealed that infants produced a variety of initiatives, and that these different infant initiatives prompted differential patterns of maternal responsive versus directive behaviors. Further, results of analyses of divergent types of maternal directive behaviors – Responsive Directives, ReDirectives, and Intrusive Directives – also may help clarify major discrepancies in the current literature regarding the positive and negative effects of maternal directiveness.

Forty-eight middle-class mothers answered questionnaires about their 11-through 18-month-old infants' typical television watching and interest, the frequency and duration of their independent play with toys and dyadic play with and without toys, and whether the television was typically on or not on in the room at the time. Mothers reported that most infants had little interest in and spent little time actively watching television. However, mothers reported the television was typically turned on in the room at least half the time during independent play with toys for 44% of infants and during dyadic play with toys for 53% of infants. These findings provide evidence relevant to researchers' and practitioners' concerns regarding the potential negative impact of television's presence on infant development, mother–child interaction, and the ecological validity of observational research methods involving play or interactions in the absence of a television.

Intrapersonal versus interpersonal factors were examined as predictors of verbal and action imitation during free play interactions by 20 mothers and their infants at ages 10, 13, 17, and 21 months. Participants’ conversational utterances and object play indicated their intrapersonal dispositions to engage in those behaviors spontaneously and provided measures of interpersonal opportunities for partner imitation. Analyses of predictive relations, including partial correlations controlling for the influence of partner modeling of imitation as well as the factors of disposition and opportunity alternately, yielded relative consistency across verbal and action domains, but distinctive patterns by partner. Infants’ imitation was more strongly predicted by disposition than by opportunity. In contrast, mothers’ imitation was more strongly predicted by opportunity, although mothers’ disposition also predicted their verbal imitation late in the second year. These results highlight the need to consider both dispositional and interpersonal influences on children's and mothers’ imitation.

First grade, third grade, and college S s attempted to memorize a single set of items over the course of 5 trials, each trial consisting of a 45-sec study period followed by a free recall test. On all trials but the first, S was allowed to have available during his study period only half of the total set of items, but was free to select whichever items he wished to include in this half. Third grade and college S s were significantly more prone than first grade S s to select for study items not recalled in the immediately preceding recall test. The results suggest that the strategy of deliberately concentrating one's study activities on the less well mastered segments of materials to be learned, like other elementary memory strategies (e.g., rote rehearsal), cannot automatically be assumed to be part of a young child's repertoire of learning techniques.