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Insights from Developmental Psychology 33

playful, and instructive behaviors from his caregiver. Furthermore, they encourage the
caregiver to treat him as being fully socially responsive, sharing the same interpretation of
the events that transpire during the interaction as she does. This imposes consistency on
her responses to him, which is critical for learning. She plays the maestro in the caregiver-
infant duet, providing various forms of scaffolding, in order to enhance and complement
her infant’s responses and to prolong the “performance” as long as possible. As she tries to
win her infant’s attention and sustain his interest, she takes into account her infant’s current
level of psychological and physiological abilities, his level of arousal, and his attention
span. Based on these considerations, she adjusts the timing of her responses, introduces
variations on a common theme to the interaction, and tries to balance the infant’s agenda
with her own agenda for him (Kaye, 1979).
The way the caregiver provides this scaffolding reflects her superior level of sophisti-
cation over her infant, and she uses this expertise to coax and guide her infant down a
viable developmental path. For the remainder of this section, I discuss the various forms
that scaffolding can take during social exchange, and how these forms foster the infant’s
development.

Directing attention Bateson (1979) argues that the learning rate of infants is accelerated
during social exchanges because caregivers focus their infants’ attention on what is impor-
tant. As discussed earlier, infants are able to direct attention to salient stimuli (especially
toward social stimuli) at a very early stage of development. The caregiver leverages her
infant’s innate perceptual predispositions to first initiate an exchange by getting his atten-
tion and then artfully directs his attention during the exchange to other objects and events
(such as directing the interaction to be about a particular toy). If his attention wanes, she will
try to re-engage him by making either herself or the toy more salient through introducing
motion, moving closer toward him, assuming a staccato manner of speech, and so forth.
This helps to sustain his attention and interest on the most salient aspects of the interaction
that she would like him to learn from. Furthermore, by directing the infant’s attention to
a desired stimulus, the caregiver can establish shared reference. This is a key component
of social modeling theory and generally facilitates the learning problem presented to the
learner as argued by Pepperberg (1988).
Affective feedback Caregivers provide expressive feedback to their infants in response
to the situations and events that their infants encounter. These affective responses can serve
as socially communicated reinforcers for the infant. They can also serve as an affective
assessment of a novel situation that the infant uses to organize his own behavior. In social
referencing, this assessment can occur via visual channels whereby the infant looks to the
caregiver’s face to see her own affective reaction to an unfamiliar situation (Siegel, 1999).
The assessment can also be communicated via auditory channels whereby the prosodic