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Caregivers play a significant role in shaping children’s early cognitive development. There is limited research on caregiver-infant behaviours during types of play interactions, and their links to infant visual cognition. To address this, we collected video-recordings from caregivers and their 6-to-10-month-old infants while they engaged in symbolic play and functional play. We coded caregiver intrusiveness and scaffolding, and infant object engagement and distractibility. We also measured visual cognition from infant looking behaviours while they engaged in a preferential looking task. Our findings revealed that there were interaction-type differences in caregiver scaffolding and infant object engagement with greater proportion of behaviours in functional play compared to symbolic play. Next, we observed robust caregiver-infant associations during symbolic play such that greater caregiver scaffolding was linked to reduced infant distractibility. Interestingly, however, only the interaction between caregiver scaffolding and infant distractibility during functional play predicted infant visual cognition. Concretely, in infants with better visual cognition, greater caregiver scaffolding was associated with reduced distractibility underscoring the importance of functional play for introducing concepts such as numerosity, and object permanence to young infants. Our findings contribute to existing work by teasing apart influences of different types of play interactions on caregiver and infant behaviours.
Wijeakumar et al. (Tue,) studied this question.