Mastery Motivation in Deaf and Hearing Infants

Abstract

The motivational characteristics of a small sample of normally developing deaf and hearing 12-month-old infants were assessed using procedures derived from Yarrow's work. The data supported the following conclusions:1. Both deaf and hearing infants exhibit similar amounts of motivated behavior toward objects which suggests that auditory contact with their surroundings is not a determining factor in infants' attempts to master objects.2. The deaf infanta spent a longer period of time engaged in social behaviors than did the hearing infants and without any apparent sacrifice to the deployment of their task-and goal-directed activities. This finding implies that the deaf infants were more skillful at integrating the competing demands of socialand object-oriented endeavors than were their hearing peers.3. The deaf infank engaged with the social environment and displayed a positive emotional response to the situation sooner than the hearing infants. Positive affect also was more likely to be followed by a social behavior for the deaf infanta which indicates that the integration of social-and object-oriented activities serves either a different or more potent function in the early development of deaf infants. W e believe that these data offer some preliminary, empirically based support for a developmental difference model when intervention strategies for deaf infants are contemplated. The policy implications for such a move may include a reduction in cognitively oriented activities and an increase in activities designed to capitalize on deaf infants' social and visual compensatory skills.The idea that infants are motivated to engage with and profit from their interactions with the environment has a long history in psychology, going back at least to McDougall(l915). It has been only comparatively recently, however , that the concept of motivated behavior in very young infants has received empirical attention. In his influential papers, White (1959, 1963) provided the conceptual outline for subsequent investigations into what has been vari-