Development of infants' contingency detection: influences of maternal behavior and effects on cognitive abilities

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Early self knowledge arises with infants' awareness of the relation or contingency between self actions and external changes. Infants' most accessible source of perceiving change contingent on their behavior occurs in interactions with their mothers. Mothers tend to reflect infants' behavior in exaggerated and perceptually salient ways, allowing infants to easily recognize the external effect of their behavior. Mothers are selective in their responsiveness to infants' actions, responding primarily to behavior perceived to have emotional content. Maternal mirroring of infants' emotional behavior facilitates infants' ability to regulate their own emotions. Yet mothers vary in the level of contingent responsiveness they provide to infants. Infants are sensitive to the particular levels of contingency experienced with their mothers and prefer those levels of contingency in novel situations, which allows their experience with such levels to be easily perpetuated. Thus, individual differences in the maternal contingency infants experience affect their emerging cognitive and emotional self knowledge. Theorists propose that infants' experience with contingency in maternal interaction also facilitates infants' later cognitive ability to interpret the actions of others as intentional. Beginning around nine months of age, infants display joint attention, in that they engage in activities with objects that acknowledge the participation of a partner. Joint attention indicates an emerging understanding of others as intentional beings whose actions are purposeful. The research program investigates the influence of individual differences in maternal contingency on infants' emerging understanding of self and other by examining (1) infants' ability to detect the effect of their behavior and to regulate their emotions during face-to-face interactions, and (2) infants' later capacities to respond to others as intentional beings. The research furthers the understanding of infants' perceptual and cognitive developments, particularly as they relate to early self knowledge and its consequences. At a practical level, the research can inform intervention programs for children at risk in their development of early knowledge of self and others, either through disability or family circumstances.