Doctoral Dissertation Research: Allomaternal care and early life development

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Humans differ from other primates in their use of extensive allomaternal care (AMC), where someone other than the mother cares for an infant. This doctoral dissertation project will investigate how differences in early exposure to multiple caregivers influence a human infant's early communicative and cognitive development. The researchers hypothesize that AMC plays a significant role in shaping communicative and cognitive development by providing a rich and varied learning environment. Identifying how exposure to AMC may influence cognitive and communicative developmental trajectories will advance our understanding of why extensive AMC developed and was maintained in the human species. This project will support training and mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students in STEM research, and a new partnership between the University of Arizona's School of Anthropology and the Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth, and Families. The outcomes of this research may also inform educational programs to support communicative and cognitive development. To share their findings with the public, the researchers will generate a website and visit local mothers' support groups. AMC is known to supplement an infant's intense energy needs through nutritional provisioning, but previous research has not fully investigated whether allomaternal care benefits infants in other ways. This research enhances traditional perceptions of AMC by hypothesizing that children gain important communicative and cognitive benefits in addition to nutritional support when they receive frequent allomaternal care during early development. The research represents an interdisciplinary, holistic approach to exploring the potential effects of AMC on early brain development before the age of two. Using a novel combination of interdisciplinary methods, including questionnaires, daily diaries, interviews, laboratory tasks, and clinical cognitive measures, this project will examine how care impacts developmental outcomes in young children. Participants will include infants aged 13 to 18 months and their mothers. The primary objective of this study is to determine whether AMC improves early developmental outcomes, such that infants exposed to high levels of AMC develop a more extensive set of communicative and cognitive skills at a younger age than infants exposed to low levels of AMC. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.