The Little Engine that Can: Infants’ Persistence Matters 

Persevering through hardships is linked to many positive outcomes in various areas of life, yet not much is known about the development of persistence in infants and young children. Researchers at the Early Childhood Cognition Lab (now the Toronto Early Cognition Lab) took a deeper look at the existing research on the early development of persistence and found that studying infants’ persistence can tell us a great deal about a child’s development.

University of Toronto psychology professor Jessica Sommerville, and Kelsey Lucca found that investigating persistence in infants could inform researchers of a child’s outcomes later in life, and gave the researchers insights into factors that motivate young children. These studies furthered the researchers’ understanding of how children think through problems and decide how to act on them.

How Persistence is Related to Long-Term Outcomes

It turns out that infant persistence, or the ability and desire to work towards a goal in the face of challenges, is related to one’s success later in life. Young children who show higher levels of persistence tend to also have better grades, be more resilient, and even have better marriages down the line. Since persistence is related to such important facets of life, it is crucial for psychologists, parents, and teachers to understand what drives persistence so that we can ensure the best outcomes for children.

Psychologists have identified some important factors, like parenting style, that moderate persistence levels in young children. It turns out that when caregivers are teaching their infant skills, the parents who are more sensitive and responsive to their child’s needs tend to foster more persistence in their children. Additionally, how and when parents praise their infant can predict how motivated their child is, even in school seven years later.

Findings like these show how important it is to do more research on persistence in early years of life when children can be most shaped by their environment. If psychologists can understand the mechanisms behind persistence in early childhood, then they can develop strategies for parents and children to improve persistence, and in doing so, improve long term outcomes of children.

What Persistence Tells Us About What Infants Know and Care About

By studying persistence, psychologists have been able to gain insight about how much infants understand in various areas of life. Research on persistence has contributed to psychologists’ understanding of a child’s ability to ignore irrelevant information, understand numbers, acquire language, and behave in a prosocial manner.

In one study, researchers hid a toy in one location and gave the infants a chance to search for the toy before letting the infant watch them move it to a new location. They found that younger children could not update the location of the toy even though they saw it moved; the young children kept looking in the first location. By measuring an infant’s persistence when searching for a hidden toy, researchers found that as children approach two years old, they start to look in the second location. Through this study, researchers were able to conclude that there is significant development in a child’s ability to block irrelevant information (the first location) to learn new information (the second location) in the first two years of life.

In another study, researchers found if an infant sees an experimenter put toys in a box, the infant will look for the number of toys they saw the experimenter put in. So, if the infant saw three toys go in a bag, but one was secretly taken out when the infant wasn’t looking, the infant was confused when they looked in the bag and found only two toys; they persisted in trying to locate the third toy. This study showed that young infants can keep track of numbers of objects and use that to guide behaviours such as persisting in the search task.

Other research has found that when infants communicate when they are unsatisfied with an outcome, they persist in trying to communicate their messages. Research has shown that even before infants can talk, they can tailor their communication in order to get what they want, and if their needs are not initially met, they will persist in communication by further tailoring the message.

Researchers have also studied how willing infants are to help other people. Research has found that infants will decide whether or not to help based on weighing the costs and benefits of the situation. In a past study, infants were more likely to help if the costs were low and the rewards were high. For example, if a researcher “accidentally” leaves behind a block, an infant is more likely to pick up the block and return it to the researcher if the block is light rather than a heavy. In this case the infant weighs the cost (physical exertion), and the benefit (being helpful), and makes their decision accordingly.

It is through these studies on persistence that researchers have learned more about the developmental trajectory of how well infants can prioritize information, what role persistence plays in communication, and how persistence can be used as a measure in prosocial behaviour. These studies reveal that even young infant’s use cost-benefit analyses when engaging in helping tasks. 

How Persistence Sheds Light on the Internal Processes of Infants

Consider the fact that persistence requires a person to be able to understand a problem and come up with strategies to overcome that problem, those are tall orders for infants. By studying infant persistence researchers can look at the relationship between how infants represent the world and how they come up with strategies to act on the world.

Researchers now know that when there is a high cost associated with helping, children are less likely to help. Further, children who are more experienced walkers were more likely to help if the block was heavy because the cost of helping was lower compared to the non-experienced walker. This shows us that infants are able to compare and evaluate their own subjective abilities to those of others and use this information to decide when and for how long to persist. Additionally, by the age of 10 months, children and infants can use the observed cost an observed individual is willing to incur to obtain a goal to infer the value of that goal.

Studying persistence tells us about infants compare their abilities to others, and establish when the rewards of persisting outweigh the costs.

Concluding Remarks

Measuring persistence and understanding related domains is crucial in order to understand, measure, and promote the success of infants and young children in a variety of domains.        

Because persistence has been shown to predict future success, understanding factors that moderate persistence is important when helping at-risk children, as well as promoting healthy development in children. These findings advance our understanding of decision making in infancy, and how these processes influence infant behaviour and development.

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