Infants' Object Interactions are Long and Complex During Everyday Joint Engagement

Infants' Object Interactions are Long and Complex During Everyday Joint Engagement As infants interact with the object world, they generate rich information about object features and possibilities for action. And much of infant learning unfolds in the presence of caregivers, who talk about and act on the objects of infant play. Does caregiver joint engagement correspond to real-time changes in the complexity and duration of infant object interactions? We observed thirty-eight mother-infant dyads (13-, 18-, and 23-month-olds) during 2 hours of everyday home activity as infants freely navigated their environments. Frame-by-frame behavioral coding yielded data on the duration and complexity of thousands of infant object interactions within and outside mother joint engagement. Object interaction bouts that involved solely manipulating/carrying objects were shorter than were bouts that incorporated complex play (i.e., the functional or symbolic use of objects). Most centrally, complex play bouts and long bout durations occurred in the presence of mothers’ multimodal input—i.e., touching, gesturing toward, and talking about the objects of infant manipulation. In fact, bouts that involved complex play and multimodal input were 7.5 times as long as simple play bouts in the absence of mother input. Moreover, “action-orienting talk” (e.g., “Can you open the jar?”, “Feed the doll”), rather than talk per se, corresponded with longer and more complex object interactions. As infants actively explore their home environments, their interactions with objects change in fundamental ways from moment to moment in the presence of caregiver multimodal engagement.