Influences of maternal behavior on infants' contingency detection and cognitive and emotional development

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Early self knowledge arises with infants' awareness of the relation between self actions and external changes. Infants' most accessible source of perceiving change contingent on their behavior typically 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. Such 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 mothers' contingency or mirroring of infants' behavior affect infants' 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 or mirroring behavior on infants' emerging understanding of self and other by examining infants' ability to detect the effect of their behavior and regulate their emotions during face-to-face interactions, and infants' later capacities to respond to others as intentional beings. The research furthers the understanding of infants' perceptual, cognitive, and emotional 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 early developmental understanding of self and others, either through physical disability or family circumstances.