Preview
Identifier
Honorable Mention
Creation Date
Spring 2021
Description
This picture of a mother stacking blocks represents our research question: do infants demonstrate an increase in construction behaviors if their mother models high levels of construction behavior? Through observations of videos of 31 infants in a construction task and five-minute videos of the infants with their parent, we have been able to address this question. For our experiment, mothers were given blocks and instructed to play with their infant as they normally do. These sessions were videotaped and later coded for how often play and construction interactions occurred, as well as which hand the mother used. From here, we were able to characterize a mother as a low, medium, or high constructor based on amount of construction that occurred. Infants were also categorized based on amount of construction. We predict that if a mother is high constructor then their infant will also be a high constructor.