Kosie, J. . & Fausey, C.
University of Oregon
People tune their behaviors to their social partners, including how they talk to and play with infants (e.g., Brand et al., 2002; Fernald, 1985; Roy et al., 2009). In everyday play, the distribution of objects depends on which objects are selected and for how long. Here, we move beyond approaches in which the structure of play is pre-determined by experimenters and instead examine its nature during freeplay. Caregiver-infant dyads (n=21, 8-16 months) played with a set of toys that included three novel and three familiar objects for approximately 15 minutes. On average, caregivers switched the object that they held roughly every 30 seconds. Caregivers appear to select and stretch these object bouts according to infants' knowledge. Caregivers of older infants selected novel objects (16-months: Mdn=.68) more often than did caregivers of younger infants (8-months: Mdn=.51). For all infants, caregivers stretched bouts with novel objects longer (Mdn=10 seconds) than familiar objects (Mdn=5 seconds). Caregivers may structure play so that as infants get to know some objects over the first two years, new opportunities arise to learn about other objects. Such tuning at all points along the developmental trajectory may help infants to successfully learn about the many objects in the world.