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Explicit scaffolding increases simple helping in younger infants
Audun Dahl1, Emma S Satlof-Bedrick2, Stuart I Hammond3
1Department of Psychology.
Developmental Psychology
|November 18, 2016
Summary
Adults' encouragement boosts helping behavior in younger infants (13-15 months). This effect diminishes in older infants (15-18 months), suggesting developmental differences in responsiveness to social scaffolding.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Infant Social Cognition
Background:
- Infants' helping behaviors emerge and develop during the second year of life.
- The role of adult social interaction, specifically scaffolding, in this developmental trajectory is not fully understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To experimentally investigate how adults' explicit scaffolding influences the development of helping behaviors in infants.
- To examine age-related differences in infants' responsiveness to explicit scaffolding.
Main Methods:
- A controlled experiment involving 69 infants aged 13-18 months performing simple helping tasks.
- Infants were divided into two groups: one receiving explicit scaffolding (encouragement, praise) and a control group receiving no scaffolding.
Main Results:
- Younger infants (under 15 months) who received explicit scaffolding helped twice as often as controls.
- Scaffolded infants showed increased helping behavior in subsequent trials even without explicit scaffolding.
- Older infants (15-18 months) did not show significant differences in helping behavior based on scaffolding.
Conclusions:
- Explicit social scaffolding significantly influences early helping behaviors in younger infants.
- The effectiveness of scaffolding is dependent on the infant's developmental stage.
- Alternative, less explicit scaffolding methods may be more appropriate for older infants.
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