Convergent Developments: Cognitive-Developmental Correlates of Growth in Infant/Toddler Peer Skills

BROWNELL, CELIA A. Convergent Developments: Cognitive-Developmental Correlates of Growth in Infant/Toddler Peer Skills. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 275-286. Much of the work in infant/ toddler peer relations has been descriptive and atheoretical. The intent of this paper is to provide some integration among several heretofore independently studied areas of early peer competence as well as to move beyond simple description by pointing to cognitive developmental correlates of some of these early changes in peer skills. A survey of age-related changes in interaction structure, interaction content, and self-other relations in interaction reveals developmental convergence with two types of advances across pretense play, language, object play, and such cognitive abilities as object search, spatial problem solving, and causal inferences. One advance is in the child's ability to integrate discrete behaviors and/or sources of information into a sequence, combination, or logical relation, such as combining words into sentences. A second advance is in the child's ability to separate mentally her own actions from actions and events in the world, i.e., decentration. For both peer skills and the parallel skills developing in other domains, there appear to be age-related constraints on the form and/or complexity of the relevant behaviors. The implications of these convergences for future research are discussed.