Abstract:
Our ability to act cooperatively with one another is essential to daily social functioning. A strong body of literature has demonstrated that the ability to cooperate develops very early on in life. However, ability is only one element required for successful cooperation. Possessing an understanding of the shared goal structure behind cooperation is also fundamental for such cooperative acts to be successful. Research suggests that infants possess an understanding of the goal structure behind cooperative acts within the first two years of life. What is less clear is when this understanding develops and under what conditions. It has been demonstrated that experience shapes the development of cooperation understanding. The extent to which other early social experiences may shape cooperative understanding has not yet been explored. The present research filled this void by investigating the extent to which parenting styles are associated with the emergence of an understanding of cooperation in 10- and 12-month-olds, concurrently and across time. Specifically, four key elements of parents' interaction style were investigated: sensitivity, leading, and two types of leading style scaffolding and directiveness. Parents' behaviour was observationally measured in a short free play parent-infant interaction session where each interaction style was rated with a novel behavioural coding scheme. Infants' cooperation understanding was measured at two time points (i.e., when infants were 10- and 12 months of age) via Henderson and Woodward's (2011) cooperation visual habituation paradigm. Results revealed that sensitivity, leading, and the level of scaffolding displayed by parents does not play a role in shaping cooperation understanding. However, our findings demonstrated that directiveness does seem to be an important early influencer of such an understanding. These findings have provided further insight into how parents shape the development of cooperative understanding during infancy.
