A baby sits on the floor and reaches toward a red ball on a floor and grunts. The mother responds, "Do you see the ball?" She picks it up and holds it in front of baby and says, "Do you want to hold the ball?" The baby shrieks in excitement as the mother hands the ball to the baby.
Parent-infant interactions, often characterized by direct eye contact and 'proto' conversations, have long been thought to be the key to infants sense of their own 'agency': how infants begin to understand the intentions of people around them, and to influence them. We all recognize episodes of infants' emerging sense of agency when we see it. Or do we?
Probably not. Most of the existing evidence is drawn exclusively from middle class, college-educated mothers and infants of European descent. There is scant evidence of how infant development unfolds in other cultural contexts and environments.
Extraordinary new research published in the July/August issue of the journal Infancy reveals how mothers from two distinct communities foster infants' sense of agency. "Pathways to Agency: Cross-Cultural Evidence from Indigenous Wichi and Eurodescendant Caregiver-Infant Interactions" was coauthored by developmental scientists Sandra Waxman at Northwestern University, and Migdalia Padilla Colón and Andrea Taverna at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientíticas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina.
Working within two distinct Argentine communities - the Indigenous Wichi in the remote Formosa province and Spanish-speaking European descendants in the urban setting of Rosario - the research team videorecorded caregiver-infant interactions beginning when infants were 12 months old and continuing until they were 2.5 years old. Twice daily, they documented naturally occurring interactions including free play, meals or snacks, physical movement and activity and engagement with others present.
The sites of these recordings were selected by families in each community, reflecting where each community's daily life naturally unfolds. Wichi families chose to host recordings in outdoor settings near their homes, while city dwelling European descendant families chose to host recordings inside their own homes. Then, together with native speakers of each community, the research team identified all episodes of social interaction between caregivers and infants.
What became evident, from reviewing these interactions, were strong commonalities in the mothers' role supporting their infants' developing agency. There were also striking differences.
For example, in the European descendant urban families, interactions typically featured two-way attention between mother and infant, most often involving a toy. The exchanges were primarily coordinated with spoken language. In contrast, Wichi family interactions with infants were communal, including siblings and other members of the community. Wichi interactions were mostly non-verbal, expressed by hugs and gazes, and sometimes incorporated objects from the natural environment.
The study provides empirical evidence for alternative pathways to infants' acquisition of agency.
"Our study shows nature and nurture going hand in hand. We observed infants' exquisite sensitivity to interactions with their caregivers, and their flexibility in interpreting the patterns of interaction in the communities in which they are raised," said Waxman, Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology and principal investigator of the Infant and Child Development Center at Northwestern.
"If we're going to understand how development unfolds, we need to look at how development is shaped in environments other than our own," Waxman said.
The study would not be possible without the sustained relationship, now lasting over 20 years, between the Wichi community and Taverna's research team in Argentina.
"What we see in the Wichi community is that agency is not simply something that develops within the individual child; it is co-constructed through relationships, shared activities and culturally organized ways of participating in the world," Colón said. "Taking these different ontologies seriously allows us to recognize that there is not a single developmental pathway to agency."
"Developmental psychology has spent decades studying how the relationship with the other constitutes the child as a subject and enables them to become an active agent in their own development," Taverna said. "What this study shows is that this 'otherness' - and the culturally situated ways we relate to it - is not universal: It is deeply embedded in culture. Understanding this is not a minor nuance, it means rethinking one of the foundational questions of our discipline."
