How social learning opportunities and individual differences in working memory capacity contribute to the development of domain general problem solving strategies during infancy

A number of psychological researchers have understood problem solving as a framework for understanding higher-level cognition (Newell, 1980), and as a bridge to unify our understanding of learning and performance (Anderson, 1993). Social experiences shape the course of children's development (Vygotsky, 1978), and children take an active role in guiding their own development through social interactions (Rogoff, 1990). The present study experimentally manipulated the social learning opportunities 60 parents provided for their 12-month-old infants and separately measured individual differences in infants' working memory capacity. The present study contributes to our understanding of problem solving development in three broad ways. First, it replicates previous results about domain general problem solving during infancy. As previously found with the pull-through-angle problem solving task, infants can use hill-climbing more readily than they can use means ends analysis. Furthermore, the pattern of pulls without retrievals that infants make suggests that the feedback they get as they use an operator influences their tendency to continue using that operator. A second contribution is an analysis of the underlying structure of working memory capacity during infancy. The principal underlying factor of two well established measures of memory during infancy, modified match-to-sample delayed response and elicited-imitation, appears to be the same and differences in performance between items are less a function of the typically understood constructs (e.g., short term memory versus working memory) but instead reflect other qualities (i.e., handedness, attention/executive function). Perhaps the largest contribution of the present study is the experimental manipulation of social learning opportunities available to infants. Scaffolding provides a unique contribution to problem-solving. Scaffolding diminishes the influence of individual differences like working memory capacity and scaffolding. Whereas both scaffolding and modeling facilitated infants' problem solving more than an absence of social learning opportunities (control), scaffolding helped infants learn faster than modeling. These results help us uncover the origins of how social learning opportunities available to infants, along with individual difference like working memory capacity, cause infants' problem solving development.