Advances in Cognition, Education, and Deafness

Mastery Motivation in Deaf and Hearing Infants: A First Look

Mastery Motivation in Deaf and Hearing Infants: A First Look Robert H. MacTurk T he idea that infants are motivated to engage their environment has only recently received empirical attention. Though White's (1959, 1963) influential papers provided the conceptual basis, it was not until the late 1970s that a concerted effort was made to operationalize the concept and develop a methodology appropriate for the study of the motivational characteristics of young infants (Jennings et al. 1979; Morgan et al. 1977). The results of these early studies served to validate the methodology in terms of its relationships to standardize measures of competence (Yarrow, Mcquiston et al. 1983; Messer et al. 1986), and parental influences on infants' motivation to master the environment (Jennings et al. 1979; McCarthy & Mcquiston 1983; Yarrow, Morgan et al. 1982; Yarrow, MacTurk et al. 1984). These studies focused on infants' motivation to explore the inanimate environment, while more recent papers have addressed the social aspects of motivated behavior (MacTurk, Hunter et al. 1985; MacTurk, Vietze et al. 1985; Wachs 1987). These latter investigations established the importance of the social domain and provided a key to further understanding of the interface between cognition and personality. Since the subjects of previous investigations of mastery motivation were all normally hearing infants, there are no data to indicate the possible influence of audition on this domain. Therefore, the purpose of this report is to examine the The authors gratefully acknowledge the efforts of Ms. Victoria M. Trimm for her assistance in modifying the original coding system for this project and for the reliability coding. 250 Mastery Motivation in Deafand Hearing Infants 251 motivational characteristics of a small group of deaf 12-month-old infants. Even though this report is exploratory in nature, we did have some expectations based both on anecdotal reports and on the results of an earlier pilot study of motherinfant interaction (Meadow-Orlans et al. 1987). The deaf infants were expected to display an increased level of behaviors directed toward the experimenter or the mother. The prediction of a relative increase in social behaviors for the deaf infants in comparison with their hearing peers is associated with the prediction of a reduced level of motivated behavior attributed to a redistribution of object-directed and socially directed activities. METHODS Subjects This report is based on 10 subjects: 7 deaf infants (4 girls and 3 boys) and 3 normally hearing infants (1 girl and 2 boys) who were seen when they were 12 months old. All the infants came from middle-income families with both parents present in the home. For the deaf infants, the mothers' mean age was 31.3 years and their education level was 15.3 years. The fathers' mean age was 33.7 years and their education level was 16.5 years. For the hearing infants, the mothers' mean age and education level were 34.5 and 18 years, respectively; the fathers' mean age and education level were 36 and 19 years. Two of the deaf infants have deaf parents, as does one of the hearing infants. Procedures Four mastery motivation tasks were presented in a fixed order for three minutes each. During the administration of the tasks, the infants sat on their mothers' laps at a feeding table, and the examiner sat across from the mother and the infant. In presenting the toy, the examiner demonstrated it to the infant, and if no interest was shown within the first minute it was demonstrated again. Afterwards , the examiner sat quietly while the child played with the toy, except to reposition the toy or to prevent it from being pulled off the table. Each mastery motivation assessment session was videotaped from behind a one-way mirror. These videotapes were coded using a system designed to capture the range of an infant's behavior in three categories: (1) behaviors directed toward the objects; (2) behaviors directed toward the mother or the experimenter; and (3) facial expressions of affect (crying/fussing, neutral, interest/excitement, and smiling/ laughing). Each of the three categories of behavior were mutually exclusive and exhaustive within a category but not between categories. The coding was performed at the individual behavior level and combined during the initial data-processing phase by adding the frequencies and durations to yield six primary measures of mastery motivation (Look, Explore, Persist, Social, Off-task, and Positive Affect).1 252 Neuroscientific Issues Measures of Mastery Motivation Based on previous...