Parental guidance fosters hands-on learning by infants in culturally different ways.

The present research examined cultural patterns of parental guidance for infants as they learned about a new physical rule with hands-on experience. Nine-month-olds participated in two sites: Taipei, Taiwan and Santa Cruz, California, United States ( N = 96; 48 males, 48 females). They watched a single exemplar of covering events that demonstrated the to-be-learned rule, which was insufficient visual experience to learn the rule. As infants explored the objects while observing, their mothers provided culturally distinct guidance. The dyads in Taipei co-enacted directive guidance through parents' hand-holding infants, whereas the dyads in Santa Cruz focused on infants' free exploration. Despite different emphases of learning, both groups of infants benefited from hands-on experience and learned the rule with the single exemplar. The finding points to diverse pathways to support the early development of physical concepts for infants from different cultural backgrounds. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).