Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Enabling Access: How Mothers Support Infants’ Emerging Motor Skills to Facilitate Infants’ Exploration of the Environment

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Drs. Karen Adolph and Catherine Tamis-LeMonda at New York University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating how mothers support infants’ increasing access to the environment as a function of their developing postural and locomotor skills. Infant learning and development are embedded in a physical and social environment.

Indeed, all infant behavior occurs in a physical space that contains objects to explore, caregivers to interact with, and places to go. And although researchers widely agree that access to the environment creates opportunities for exploration and learning, we know little about the social processes that enable infants to expand their environmental access as new motor skills—sitting, standing, crawling, walking—emerge.

Of course, infants’ own developing abilities support their independent access to the environment. However, development is not a solo act, as caregivers can structure and help their infants access new features of everyday environments. This study will test the processes that underlie this concept by: (1) assessing caregivers’ beliefs about their infants’ abilities to access distant objects or places in the environment (i.e., what caregivers think their infants can do) and (2) characterizing caregivers’ moment-to-moment support behaviors as they help their infants gain access to out-of-reach objects or places.

This research will yield novel insights into caregivers’ beliefs about their infants’ development (an important, but understudied topic) and a deeper understanding of how caregivers support infants’ motor skills for exploration, learning, and play.

The overall goal of this project is to experimentally test the social processes that enable infants to access the environment. In four aims using novel methods and a cross-sectional, age-matched control design, we will test mothers’ beliefs, support behaviors, responsiveness, and support profiles to enable infant access. To do so, we will introduce two novel psychophysical tasks to precisely quantify caregivers’ beliefs about their infants’ ability to access the environment.

We will test infants’ abilities to access a toy placed at various distances from the infant, and characterize caregiver’s support behaviors as infants attempt to access the object at each distance. To better understand the moment-to-moment nature of caregiver support, we will also examine whether support is responsive to infants’ real-time behaviors as infants attempt to access the toy.

Finally, we will identify unique profiles of caregivers’ real-time support behaviors that enable infant access to the environment. For all aims, we will leverage the power of video coding and share all study materials with the broader research community on Databrary.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.