How Infants Learn to Influence Others Differs Sharply Across Cultures, Study Finds

Most research on how infants develop a sense of agency — understanding that they can influence the people around them — has come from studies of middle-class, college-educated mothers and infants of European descent, leaving little evidence of how this unfolds in other cultural settings. A new study in the journal Infancy, led by developmental scientists Sandra Waxman of Northwestern University with Migdalia Padilla Colón and Andrea Taverna of Argentina's CONICET, set out to address that gap by comparing two very different communities.

The research team compared the Indigenous Wichi community in Argentina's remote Formosa province with Spanish-speaking, European-descendant families in the urban setting of Rosario. Working with native speakers from each community, researchers video-recorded caregiver-infant interactions twice daily from when infants were 12 months old until they turned 2.5, capturing free play, meals, movement and engagement with others in locations the families themselves chose to reflect their daily life — outdoor settings near Wichi homes, and inside the homes of the Rosario families.

The researchers found strong commonalities in how mothers in both communities supported their infants' developing sense of agency, but also striking differences. In the urban European-descendant families, interactions typically featured two-way attention between mother and infant, often centered on a toy and coordinated mainly through spoken language. Wichi interactions, by contrast, were communal, involving siblings and other community members, and were mostly nonverbal — expressed through hugs and gazes, and sometimes incorporating objects from the natural environment.

"What we see in the Wichi community is that agency is not simply something that develops within the individual child; it is co-constructed through relationships, shared activities and culturally organized ways of participating in the world," said Padilla Colón. The study drew on more than 20 years of an ongoing relationship between the Wichi community and Taverna's research team in Argentina.