Let's Cross the Next One: Parental Scaffolding of Prospective Control Over Movement

The influence of infantile cues on motivated perception of threats among caregivers

Human infants are born helpless and entirely dependent on their adult caregivers for survival. It is this very helplessness, however, that serves as a powerful signal to nearby adults and reorganizes attention towards potential dangers. As members of an altricial and alloparental species, adults are perceptually sensitive to infantile cues. Infants change how adults attend to the world around them as well as how adults perceive affordances that can shape adaptive caregiving behaviors. By being sensitive to the presence of an infant, and their potential for getting into danger, adults can make decisions and respond to potential threats in ways that keep children safe from harm. Thus, we argue that parenthood represents a developmental transition that builds on existing perceptual biases, such as greater attention towards infantile cues, and serves as a useful model for studying threat perception. Here we review evidence that the task of providing care to children shapes how adults process information about threat, such as attention towards potential threat cues, perception of the social and physical world, and judgment of risk under uncertainty. We propose a theoretical framework of threat perception that focuses on how the demands of being a social altricial species, namely the demands of providing care to young, influence perceptual systems and plays a strong role in organizing how adults view the world around them. The motivated perceptual experiences of caregivers represent an untapped area of research that can increase our understanding of perceptual function and plasticity across the lifespan.

Higher order affordances

Affordances are opportunities for action for a given animal (or animals) in a given environment or situation. The concept of affordance has been widely adopted in the behavioral sciences, but important questions remain. We propose a new way of understanding the nature of affordances; in particular, how affordances are related to one another. We claim that many - perhaps most - affordances emerge from non-additive relations among other affordances, such that some affordances are of higher order relative to other affordances. That is, we propose that affordances form a continuous category of perceiveables that differ only in whether and how they relate to other affordances. We argue that: (1) opportunities for behaviors of all kinds can be described as affordances, (2) some affordances emerge from relations between animal and environment, whereas most affordances emerge from relations between other affordances, and (3) all affordances lawfully structure ambient energy arrays and, therefore, can be perceived directly. Our concept of higher order affordances provides a general account of behavioral phenomena that traditionally have been interpreted in terms of cognitive processes (e.g., remembering or imagining) as well as behavioral phenomena that have traditionally been interpreted in terms of cultural rules, such as conventions, or customs.

How Do Child ADHD Symptoms and Oppositionality Impact Parent-Child Interactions When Crossing Virtual Roads?

OBJECTIVE

This study examined how parents and children interact when crossing virtual roads together. We examined (1) whether children's inattention/hyperactivity and oppositionality and children's failure to jointly perform the task interfered with parents' efforts to scaffold children's road-crossing skill and (2) whether experience with the joint road-crossing task impacted children's subsequent performance in a solo road-crossing task.

METHODS

Fifty-five 8- to 10-year-old children with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and their parents first jointly crossed a lane of traffic in an immersive pedestrian simulator. Children then completed the same road-crossing task alone. Parents completed questionnaires about children's symptoms of inattention/hyperactivity and oppositionality.

RESULTS

Analyses of the joint road-crossing task showed that when parents and children crossed different gaps, parents suggested and opposed more gaps and were less likely to use a prospective gap communication strategy (i.e., communicating about a crossable gap prior to its arrival). Crossing different gaps was also associated with increased expressions of negative affect among parents and children and an increase in collisions among children. Children's level of parent-reported oppositionality also predicted an increase in child defiance and parental redirection of child behavior. Analyses of children's subsequent crossing performance indicated that parents' use of a prospective gap communication strategy during the joint road-crossing task predicted selection of larger gaps during the solo crossing task.

CONCLUSIONS

Not crossing through the same gap and increased levels of child oppositionality interfered with the scaffolding process, potentially informing future parent-based intervention efforts for increasing children's road-crossing safety.