Mother-Infant Interaction in the Emergence of a Tool-Using Skill at Mealtime: A Process of Affordance Selection

ABSTRACT This study provides a detailed description of the process of the emergence of the utensil-using skill of infants to control encounters with food and mother-infant joint action that surrounds the emergence of this context-specific skill. Longitudinal observations from the first contact with a utensil to the beginning of successful self-feeding with a utensil found that there was an extended period of exploratory utensil use that precedes the use of the utensil for the goal of feeding around which adults organized the environment where such feeding-irrelevant activities of the infants were tolerated. Subsequently, adults gradually introduced and highlighted the opportunities for infants' functional feeding encounters, often by adjusting the position of objects on the table. Overall, we found the process of what may be called affordance selection—in which a definite set of opportunities for action among many available were selected by adults to invite certain spontaneous behaviors of developing infants. This study adds to the growing realization that normally occurring experiences of rich affordances matter in the development of specific behavior in a given cultural context.