Changes in Cooperation and Self-Other Differentiation during the Second Year

Author(s): Celia A. Brownell and Michael Sean Carriger

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Child Development, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Aug., 1990), pp. 1164-1174
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Society for Research in Child Development
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Changes in Cooperation and Self-Other
Differentiation during the Second Year

Celia A. Brownell and Michael Sean Carriger

University of Pittsburgh

BROWNELL,CELIAA., and CARRIGER, MICHAELSEAN. Changes in Cooperation and Self-Other

Differentiation during the Second Year.CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1990,61, 1164-1174. Cooperationin
peer interactionemerges duringthe second half of the second year. A considerationof the skills and
knowledge entailed in these early forms of cooperationsuggests that young children's emerging
ability to differentiate self from other as causal agents may relate to their ability to coordinate
behavior with age mates toward a common goal. Children at 12, 18, 24, and 30 months were
observed in same-age,same-sexdyads (8 dyads per age) while attemptingto solve a simple coopera-
tion problem. They were also individually administeredan elicited imitationtask used to index
decentration,or self-otherdifferentiation.No 12-month-olddyadcould cooperate,18-month-oldsdid
so infrequentlyand apparentlyaccidentally,whereas 24- and 30-month-oldswere able to coordinate
behavior with one anotherquickly and effectively. Childrenwho were betterable to accommodate
their behavior to one another during cooperationalso representedthe agency of others at a more
advanced, decentered level.

Children begin to engage in prosocial be-
havior in the second year of life, including
cooperation, sharing, helping, and responding
empathically to emotional distress in others.
These developments become especially rapid
and differentiated between 18 and 24 months
(Radke-Yarrow, Zahn-Waxler, & Chapman,
1983; Zahn-Waxler, lannotti, & Chapman,
1982). Why should such behaviors emerge so
systematically during the second year? One
possibility is that the motivational base for re-
sponding to others begins to mature during
this period. A second, and perhaps related,
possibility is that certain cognitive or social-
cognitive abilities universally develop during
this age period that are especially germane to
decentered interactions with others.
Several investigators have independently
suggested that understanding and differen-
tiating self versus others is a salient devel-
opmental task during the second year, and
that this fundamental cognitive change facili-
tates numerous other social developmental
changes. These include acquisition of a vari-
ety of early peer interaction skills (Brownell,
1986), sustained conversations with adults
(Kagan, 1981), awareness of external stan-
dards set by others and attempts to achieve
them (Bullock & Lutkenhaus, 1988; Kagan,
1981; Kopp, 1982), and several aspects of
early prosocial behavior (Radke-Yarrow et al.,
1983; Zahn-Waxler et al., 1982). Building on
these arguments, the present study examines
the relation between developments in self-
other differentiation and cooperation with
peers during the second year.
In 1979, Hay noted that cooperation had
not been systematically studied in children
under 3 years, and she set about remedying
the situation with an exploration of children's
cooperation with their parents. She found that
only one of eight 12-month-olds engaged in a
cooperative game with a parent, whereas
seven of eight 18- and 24-month-olds did so.
Furthermore, cooperative games increased in
frequency between 18 and 24 months. Similar
findings were reported 2 years earlier by Ross
and Goldman (1977).
In the ensuing decade relatively little re-
search has been conducted on early forms of
cooperation. A handful of investigators, how-
ever, have provided some additional insights

Portionsof these data were presented at the InternationalConferenceon InfantStudies, 1988,

and at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1989. Appreciationis
extended to Earnestine Brown who helped to design and test the stimuli and procedure. This
researchwas facilitatedby an Awardfor Young Scholarsin Social and Affective Development from
the Foundation for Child Development to the first author.Correspondencemay be addressed to
Celia Brownell, Psychology Department,Universityof Pittsburgh,Pittsburgh,PA 15260.
[Child Development,1990, 61, 1164-1174. ? 1990 by the Society for Researchin Child Development,Inc.
All rights reserved.0009-3920/90/6104-0026$01.00]

into its development. Although 12-month-
olds interact socially with one another, not
until 18 to 24 months do peer interactions re-
volve around "shared meanings" with obvi-
ous themes, roles, and turn-taking. The term
"roles" in this article refers to interactional or
behavioral roles, as used by previous investi-
gators such as Eckerman and Stein (1982),
Mueller and Lucas (1975), and Ross (1982).
Interactional roles are comprised of actions by
each child that relate to the actions of the part-
ner. Younger children tend to act in ways
tangential to, rather than thematically related
to, the partner's behavior (Brenner & Mueller,
1982; Eckerman & Stein, 1982; Howes, 1985).
Correspondingly, 18-24-month-olds engage
in more games with both peers and adults
than do younger toddlers, and their games be-
come longer and more reciprocal over the sec-
ond half of the second year (Eckerman, Davis,
& Didow, 1989; Eckerman & Stein, 1982;
Ross, 1982). Twenty-four-month-olds in same-
age dyads also can coordinate their behavior
with a peer to achieve a goal collaboratively
(Brownell, 1989), but 18-month-olds cannot.
Hence, over the second year toddlers increas-
ingly coordinate their behavior with each
other to achieve effective social interaction,
and they more frequently engage in coopera-
tive play.
Existing studies of the skills that contrib-
ute to these early forms of cooperation have
emphasized children's regulation of roles.
Eckerman and Stein (1982) explored toddlers'
ability to establish a joint interactive topic
around an object and to assume comple-
mentary roles in a game. Brownell (1989)
similarly studied toddlers' emerging ability to
adopt complementary behavior during same-
age and mixed-age cooperative problem solv-
ing. Ross (1982) observed the content and se-
quencing of roles in peer games among
toddlers, and Ross and Lollis (1987) studied
toddlers' ability to recognize and respond to
role violations in games with parents. In each
case, evidence was provided for develop-
mental advances during the second year in
children's ability to manage interactional
roles. This emphasis is probably no accident.
The joint coordination of related behavior is
at the heart of cooperation, whether in play or
in joint problem solving. Children must be
able to represent, monitor, and regulate both
their own and the partner's behavior relative
to their relation to a single, common goal.
These abilities may rely on the develop-
ment of several more fundamental sorts of
understanding, such as causal relations and
self-other relations. That is, to understand and
Brownell and Carriger 1165
coordinate two independent sources of be-
havior in cooperation, the child must be able
to represent specific causal relations between
his or her own actions and the independent
actions of the partner (see Schaffer, 1979). It
can be hypothesized that as children come
more fully to differentiate self from other,
able to represent self's and other's actions as
independently caused, they should also be-
come more skilled at adopting behavior that is
independent of but complementary to a part-
ner's behavior (Brownell, 1986).
Although prior work has pointed to de-
velopmental advances between 18 and 24
months in cooperative abilities, there has
been no previous effort to examine relations
with cognitive or social-cognitive develop-
ment. There is little reason to expect broad
correspondences between general interac-
tional skills and cognitive or social-cognitive
developments, as abundant research has
made clear in the last few years. Many schol-
ars, however, now suggest that it may be fruit-
ful to pursue more limited relations across
specific domains that are hypothesized to
share specific skills (e.g., Brownell, 1986;
Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1986; Hartup & Brownell,
1988; McCune-Nicolich, 1981). As a first step
in extending our understanding of young chil-
dren's emerging cooperative abilities, then, it
would be appropriate to explore concor-
dances between developments in under-
standing of self-other relations and in chil-
dren's skills at adopting and managing
behavior cooperatively. That was the purpose
of this study.
Self-other differentiation (decentration)
has been conceptualized as the ability to rep-
resent self as one sort of object among, but
distinct from, all other objects (Piaget, 1954,
1962). The child comes to separate the world
from his or her actions on it, and can repre-
sent self and self's actions in relation to ob-
jects and to others. Age-related transitions in
this domain occur at regular intervals over the
second year (see Fein, 1981). At first (12-15
months) the child does not represent self and
other as different causal agents, instead repre-
senting self as the universal agent. The child
is unaware of other's causal agency. During
the second phase (15-20 months), the child
differentiates the other as a passive recipient
of self's actions, but still conceives of self as
the universal agent. Finally, the child con-
ceives of others as active, autonomous agents
in relation to their own actions, independ-
ent of the child's actions or wishes (20-24
months).
1166 Child Development
The typical way to operationalize and
study the young child's conception and repre-
sentation of self and others has been via pre-
tend play with animate replicas (dolls, stuffed
animals). This is presumed to be an accurate
window onto the child's representation of the
agency of actual animates (see Fenson &
Ramsay, 1980, 1981; Nicolich, 1977; Watson
& Fischer, 1977, 1980; Wolf, 1982). In the
present study, decentration was assessed us-
ing an elicited pretense procedure. Actions
with animate replicas were modeled at pro-
gressively higher levels of agency, and the
child was asked to imitate these actions. As in
research on language development, which
employs elicited imitation, the assumption is
that the child will imitate at his or her current
level of competence, even when the level
modeled is more advanced than the child's
current one. Previous research using this pro-
cedure to index self-other differentiation has
shown that modeling elicits the child's high-
est level of competence, and that this corre-
lates with the highest step shown in spon-
taneous free play (Bretherton, O'Connell,
Shore, & Bates, 1984; Fenson & Ramsay,
1981; Watson & Fischer, 1980).
Children's ability to manage roles in co-
operation was indexed by several aspects of
their performance during joint problem solv-
ing of a simple task. Coordinating com-
plementary behavior was necessary for suc-
cess. Thus, as in playful social interaction, the
children had to manage their roles by timing
and sequencing their behavior in relation to
the partner's behavior.
Method
Subjects.- Sixty-four children, 16 at each
of four ages, participated: 12-15 months (M =
13.8 months), 18-21 months (M = 19.7
months), 24-27 months (M = 24.8 months),
and 30-33 months (M = 30.8 months). There
were equal numbers of boys and girls at 12
months; at each of the other ages there were
10 boys and six girls. Subjects were recruited
through birth lists made available by a local
obstetrics hospital that serves an urban popu-
lation. Families were of middle to upper-
middle socioeconomic status by parents' re-
port.
Procedure.-Upon being recruited, each
child was unsystematically paired with an un-
familiar, same-age, same-sex peer. Children
came to the laboratory playroom in pairs, ac-
companied by parents, who remained with
the children at all times. A male experimenter
conducted all sessions. Pilot testing had es-
tablished that there were no differences in
children's performance as a function of the
experimenter's sex. Each session was video-
taped with equipment located in a separate
room. Visual access was achieved through a
one-way mirror and audio recording from a
microphone in the playroom.
After a warm-up free-play period with
the experimenter, the children were pre-
sented with two tasks in succession. One task
involved elicited imitation of a series of ex-
perimenter-modeled pretense scenarios. This
task provided the measure of self-other differ-
entiation (decentration). It was administered
individually to each child. The second task
was a problem to be solved jointly by the two
toddlers. This provided the measures of coop-
eration. The two tasks were counterbalanced
for order.
During the decentration task, children
were seated on the floor with a parent. Each
child was presented with five different pre-
tend scenarios, one at a time. Each scenario
consisted of three distinct actions (e.g., stir-
ring, pouring, and eating). A scenario was
modeled twice in succession along with a ver-
bal description of the actions modeled, after
which the experimenter said, "Now, it's your
turn." If the child did not attempt to imitate
within a few seconds, the experimenter said,
"Can you show me what I did? Can you do
just what I did?" If the child still did not at-
tempt to imitate, the experimenter asked the
parent to encourage the child to reproduce
the "story."
Five levels of agency were presented by
the experimenter, one per scenario. Level 1
represented self as agent (e.g., pretend to feed
self with a spoon). Level 2 represented an ani-
mate replica as a passive recipient of self's
acts (e.g., pretend to feed a doll with a spoon).
Level 3 represented an animate replica as an
active agent (e.g., put the spoon in the hand of
the doll and pretend to make it feed itself).
Level 4 represented two animate replicas in-
teracting (e.g., put the spoon in the hand of
the doll and pretend to make it feed another
doll). Level 5 represented an animate replica
as an active agent along with the use of inter-
nal state words (e.g., put the spoon in the
hand of the doll and pretend to make it feed
itself, along with making the doll say "I'm so
hungry"). Although there is substantial em-
pirical evidence for the first three levels,
there is no research concerning the ordering
of the last two. This ordering was suggested
by age trends reported in Bretherton et al.
(1984), Watson and Fischer (1980), and Wolf

(1982). As it turned out, few children imitated
at Level 4 or Level 5 anyway; hence the ques-
tion of whether the sequence indeed occurs
in this order is moot for the purposes of this
study.
There were five scenario themes (eating,
bedtime, going to the doctor, fixing a "boo-
boo," and grooming). These were randomly
assigned to level of agency for each subject,
so that no particular theme was systematically
associated with any level of agency. Order of
presentation was randomized across subjects.
The scenarios and the elaboration of levels
of agency were adapted from Watson and
Fischer (1977, 1980), Fenson and Ramsay
(1981), and Bretherton et al. (1984).
For the cooperation task, each dyad en-
countered one of three cooperation problems
for 7 min, counterbalanced across dyads.
Each problem required the use of a simple
tool, a handle that one child could push to
make available to the second child two toy
animals held in a small cup attached to the
end of the handle. The problems each op-
erated on the same general principle. The
spring-loaded handle, with the attached cup
containing the animals, was rotated horizon-
tally beneath the surface of a transparent table
top in one problem ("rotator"), or pushed
horizontally through a transparent cylinder in
the second problem ("piston"), or pushed
down vertically against a fulcrum inside a
transparent box in the third problem
("lever"). The animals became accessible
through a hole in the end of the cylinder, or in
the top of the table or the box. Because the
handle was spring-loaded, the child operating
it had to hold it in its fully extended position
to permit access to the animals. No strength
was required to push or to hold the handle. If
the child released the handle the animals
once again became unavailable. The child
who operated the handle was prevented from
reaching the animals by a clear Plexiglas bar-
rier. If the second child stood next to the first
child, access to the animals was blocked for
that child also. Thus the second child had to
position herself opposite the first to retrieve
the animals as they were made available by
the first child. The problems could not be
solved by an individual child working alone.
The children were therefore required to coor-
dinate complementary roles both spatially, by
positioning themselves opposite one another,
and temporally by sequencing their behavior
so that as one child operated the handle the
other child retrieved the animals.
The experimenter escorted the children
to one side of the apparatus, drew their atten-
Brownell and Carriger 1167
tion to the animals in the cup, and said, "Do
you see those animals in there? You can play
with them if you get them out," as he demon-
strated the operation of the handle. As long as
at least one child remained on task, their ac-
tivity was not interrupted. If both children
wandered off task for 15 sec, the experimenter
redirected their attention to the animals and
repeated the instructions. If the children re-
trieved the animals, they were permitted to
play with them briefly, whereupon the cup
was reloaded, and the children allowed to
solve the problem again.
Measures.-For each pretend scenario
presented, the number of different actions the
child imitated was recorded (maximum of
three per scenario), as was the level of decen-
tration represented in each of the child's ac-
tions. The child did not have to preserve the
sequence of the actions to be credited with an
imitation. One measure of decentration, then,
was the highest level of agency represented
in the child's imitations. For purposes of sta-
tistical analysis, a weighted composite score
was also created by multiplying the number
of actions imitated at each level by the value
of that level (1 to 5) and summing the prod-
ucts. For example, three actions imitated at
Level 1 and two actions at Level 2 would re-
ceive a composite score of 7, while two ac-
tions imitated at Level 1 and three at Level 2
would receive a score of 8. Children who im-
itated more often at more advanced levels of
decentration thus received higher composite
scores.
For each solution attempt on the coopera-
tion problem, several goal-directed behaviors
were coded for their frequency of occurrence.
A solution was counted when a child touched
the animals in the cup, and latency to solu-
tion was recorded. Other behaviors were cho-
sen to capture the children's attempts to coor-
dinate their behavior, regardless of whether
solution was actually achieved or not. Coordi-
nation of roles spatially was indexed by the
changes in position children made relative to
one another (move to same side as partner;
move to side opposite partner).Moving to the
side opposite the partner reflects coordination
of behavior with the partner, whereas moving
to the same or adjacent side reflects absence
of coordination. Amount of time opposite the
partner was also recorded. Temporal coor-
dination was indexed by whether a child
paused when pushing the handle and making
the animals accessible to permit the other
child time to retrieve them (manipulate-
pause). Lack of coordination was evidenced
when the child simply manipulated the han-
1168 Child Development
TABLE 1
BEHAVIORS DURING COOPERATIVEPROBLEM SOLVINGAS A FUNCTION OF AGE

AGE

12 18 24 30
MEASURE Months Months Months Months

Number of solutions ......................... 0 .5 4.8 4.5

(0) (.5) (3.7) (5.6)
Latency to Solution 1 ...................... 7.0 4.7 3.3 4.5
(0) (2.9) (2.0) (2.5)
Latency to Solution 2a . ...................... ..... 1.1 .9
(.82) (1.3)
Latency to Solution 3 ....................... ...... .4 .4
(.49) (.5)
Frequency move opposite partner ............ 1.0 3.4 3.7 4.1
(1.1) (2.6) (2.4) (2.5)
Frequency move adjacent partner ............ .8 2.8 3.1 4.2
(.8) (2.6) (1.6) (2.8)
Proportiontime opposite .................... .54 .50 .62 .57
(.33) (.22) (.17) (.28)
Proportion coordinated behavior .............. .03 .21 .38 .33
(.07) (.17) (.17) (.23)
NOTE.-Values represent mean frequency or proportion per dyad. Standard deviations are in parentheses.
a 12- and 18-month-olds never achieved more than one solution.

die without consideration of the partner (ma- Results

nipulate handle without pause). A child
could also coordinate behavior with the part-
ner by anticipating the lure (animals) while
the partner pushed the handle. Finally, a
child could attempt to alter the other child's
goal-directed activity by directing requests/
directions/commands for task-related behav-
ior to the partner, and the partner could coor-
dinate behavior with the peer's by complying
with the request, or could fail to coordinate
behavior by ignoring, resisting, or refusing to
comply. A similar failure to coordinate behav-
ior was evidenced when one child attempted
to physically displace the other child during
goal-directed activity. Simple exploration of
the problem (independent of other goal-
directed activity) was also recorded. A com-
posite variable of proportion coordinated be-
havior was then created by summing the
frequencies of manipulate-pause, anticipate
lure, direct other's behavior, and comply with
partner's direction and dividing this sum by
the sum of all on-task behavior. Movements to
the same and opposite sides of the task rela-
tive to the partner were analyzed separately.
Interobserver reliability.-Videotapes
were independently coded by two observers
who had been trained to criterion interrater
reliability of .85 overall (range = .79 to .97
percentage agreement). Reliability checks
were conducted on one-third of the observa-
tions, randomly selected, and reliability re-
mained at or above initial training levels.
Analyses were directed to three ques-
tions: (1) age differences in children's ability
to coordinate behavior with one another dur-
ing cooperative problem solving, (2) age dif-
ferences in children's ability to differentiate
self and other during pretense, (3) relations
between these two abilities. Preliminary anal-
yses revealed no sex differences on any mea-
sure, or differences as a function of prior play
experience with other children. Nor were
there differences as a function of task order or
cooperation problem. Subsequent analyses
were thus performed on data collapsed over
these conditions. All post hoc analyses were
conducted using the Scheff6 test, and all re-
ported differences were significant at p < .05.
Cooperation.-No 12-month-old dyad
was able to solve the problem cooperatively.
Half of the 18-month-old dyads (4 out of 8) did
so once, and most of the 24- and 30-month-old
dyads solved it multiple times (6 out of 8, and
5 out of 8, respectively). One-way analysis of
variance with four levels of age revealed that
these age differences were significant, F(3,28)
= 4.56, p < .01. Post hoc analyses indicated
that 12-month-olds achieved fewer solutions
than did 18-month-olds, who achieved fewer
than 24- or 30-month-olds, who did not differ
from one another (see Table 1).
Age differences were also significant for
latency to the first solution, F(3,28) = 3.92, p
< .02. Twelve-month-olds spent more time

than did any other age. Because they never
solved the problem, they spent the entire 7
min on their first attempt. Time to the first
solution did not differ among 18-, 24-, and 30-
month-olds, however. That finding is all the
more interesting because, of those 18-month-
olds who solved the problem, not one dyad
was able to solve it again. In a two-way
ANOVA (solution number x age) for latency
to solution among 24- and 30-month-olds
only, the interaction effect was not significant.
In other words, 30-month-olds did not get
progressively faster over solutions compared
to 24-month-olds. Thus, both 24- and 30-
month-olds were able to solve the problem
quickly and repeatedly in the allotted time,
whereas 12-month-olds were unable to coop-
erate with one another at all, and 18-month-
olds apparently did so only accidentally since
they could not re-achieve solution.
These findings are buttressed by the data
on children's coordination of behavior during
problem-solving attempts. There were no
significant age differences for the time chil-
dren spent in complementary positions oppo-
site one another at the task. However, the
amount of time children spent in complemen-
tary positions was related to the number of
times they solved the problem (r = .79, p <
.001). There was an age-related effect for the
frequency of movements around the task,
both to the same side as the partner and to the
side opposite the partner, F(3,28) = 6.48, p <
.001, and 6.96, p < .001, respectively. Post
hoc tests indicated that the 12-month-olds
produced both types of movement less often
than did the other three-ages, which were not
different from one another. In other words,
the older dyads appeared to move around the
task both to join (or displace) their partner and
to complement their partner's behavior, while
the youngest dyads' movements relative to
one another were minimal.
In line with this finding, which suggests
active attempts to coordinate behavior among
the older toddlers, age differences also
emerged on the summary variable of coor-
dinated behavior, F(3,28) = 13.64, p < .001.
The 24- and 30-month-old dyads engaged in
proportionally more coordinated behavior
than did the 18-month-olds, who in turn en-
gaged in more coordinated behavior than did
the 12-month-olds. Further, the amount of
coordinated behavior children exhibited was
related to how often they changed positions
relative to their partners, both to the same
side (r = .29, p < .02) and to the opposite side
(r = .30, p < .02). Coordinated behavior was
also related to the time to achieve solutions (r
= -.29, p < .02, for solution 1; r = -.38, p <
Brownell and Carriger 1169
TABLE 2
DISTRIBUTION OF COORDINATED BEHAVIORSOVER
A SOLUTION ATTEMPT AS A FUNCTION OF AGE
DISTRIBUTION OF BEHAVIORS
10 Sec Prior All Other
AGE to Solution Times
18 months ........ 6 (.12) 45 (.88)
24 months ........ 86 (.49) 89 (.51)
30 months ........119 (.73) 45 (.27)
NOTE.-Values represent mean frequency per dyad.
Proportions are in parentheses.
.002, for solution 2; r = -.38, p < .002, for
solution 3), and marginally to the number of
solutions for the dyad (r = .21, p < .09).
Finally, coordinated behavior was dis-
tributed differently across the solution at-
tempt for each age (see Table 2). A two-way,
repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted
on the frequency of coordinated behaviors.
Factors were age (18, 24, 30 months) and time
period during the solution attempt (10 sec
prior to solution vs. all other times). There
were no main effects, but the interaction was
marginally significant, F(2,15) = 3.17, p <
.07. This suggests that the oldest children's
coordinated behavior was most likely to occur
just prior to solution, whereas the youngest
children's coordinated behavior was least
likely to occur then. Among 24-month-olds,
coordinatedbehavior was equally likely to oc-
cur immediately prior to solution as at other
times during a solution attempt.
In a supplemental analysis, which can
only be suggestive because of the small num-
ber of dyads, 18-month-olds who solved the
problem (n = 4 dyads) were compared to 18-
month-olds who did not (n = 4 dyads). There
were no differences between them for propor-
tion of coordinated behavior, suggesting again
that solutions at this age were accidental
rather than being due to active coordination
of behavior between partners. Older children,
then, more frequently exhibited coordinated
behavior and distributed this behavior closer
in time to the solution, and this, in turn, re-
lated to successful problem solving.
Decentration.-Age was significantly re-
lated to the highest level of decentration at
which children represented at least one im-
itated action, Kendall's tau = .42, p < .001
(see Table 3). Most 12-month-olds imitated at
Level 1 (self as agent) or Level 2 (other as
passive recipient). Most 18-month-olds im-
itated at Level 2, while most 24- and 30-
1170 Child Development
TABLE 3
RELATION BETWEEN AGE AND DECENTRATION

DECENTRATION

AGE Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4

12 months ............. 5 9 1 0
18 months ............. 0 10 4 1
24 months ............. 0 6 8 2
30 months ............. 0 7 8 1
NOTE.-Values are the number of children for whom a given level of decentration
was their highest level represented during imitation.

month-olds imitated at Level 3 or 4 (other as
active agent; two active others interacting).
The average age at which Level 1 was
achieved as the highest level imitated was 12
months. For Level 2 it was 20.1 months; for
Level 3, 24.6 months; and for Level 4, 24.0
months, F(3,58) = 6.91, p < .01. Similarly, the
composite decentration score (number of ac-
tions represented at each level) increased
with age, F(3,58) = 15.3, p < .001. Post hoc
analyses revealed that 24- and 30-month-olds'
decentration scores (M = 3.8, and 4.4, respec-
tively) were higher than 18-month-olds' (M =
2.9), which were higher than 12-month-olds'
(M = 1.5). Hence, over the second year chil-
dren became progressively more skilled at
representing decentered relations between
self and other in pretense.
Relation between cooperation and de-
centration.-Within dyads, partners' decen-
tration scores were unrelated to one another
(intraclass r = .14), as were'their scores for
coordinated behavior (intraclass r = .05).
Thus, the scores of both dyad members were
entered into subsequent correlational anal-
yses. Across dyads, children's composite de-
centration score was related to the amount of
coordinated behavior they exhibited on the
cooperation problem (r = .40, p < .001). Thus
children at higher levels of decentration were
also more able to cooperate with a peer. The
composite decentration score was also related
to how often children changed position to
complement the partner's behavior on the op-
posite side of the task (r = .37, p < .003), a
separate indication of their ability to coordi-
nate behavior. Interestingly, the composite
decentration score was not related to the fre-
quency with which children moved to the
same side of the problem as the partner,
which is arguably a more primitive strategy
(Brownell, 1989). When age was partialed out
of the correlation between decentration and
coordinated behavior, their relation was no
longer significant. This is not altogether sur-
prising since age is closely associated with
each (see Tables 1 and 3).
At a slightly finer grain, we asked at
which level of decentration children began to
show cooperation. Although our measures of
cooperation are continuous rather than cate-
gorical, we approximated a categorical mea-
sure by using a cut-off for proportion of coor-
dinated behavior above which children were
considered to be cooperating. We chose the
arbitrary and somewhat stringent but intui-
tively appealing cut-off of 50%. Thus, if half
or more of children's task-related behavior in-
cluded some attempt at coordination with the
partner, the child was said to be cooperating.
When children were cross-classified accord-
ing to their level of decentration and whether
they cooperated or not (see Table 4), it be-

TABLE 4
RELATION BETWEEN LEVEL OF DECENTRATION AND COOPERATION

DECENTRATION

COOPERATION Level 1 Level 2 Level 3/4

H igha............................. 0 2 7
Low .......................... 5 31 16
NOTE.-Values
a Children were
represent number of children.
classified as high in cooperation if 50% or more of their task-related
behavior was coordinated with the partner's behavior.

came evident that the number of children
who regularly cooperated with a peer in-
creased at Levels 3 and 4, X2(2) = 7.85, p <
.05. In other words, systematic efforts to coor-
dinate behavior with the partner appeared to
emerge in conjunction with the ability to rep-
resent others' agency.
Pairs of children can also be distin-
guished by the match between partners'
levels of decentration, and we asked whether
the composition of a dyad with respect to de-
centration affected solutions. For single solu-
tions, dyad composition made no difference.
However, only one of the six dyads in which
both children exhibited Level 2 decentration
was able to solve the problem more than
once. In contrast, half the dyads (6 out of 11)
in which one child exhibited Level 2 decen-
tration and the other was at Level 3 solved the
problem multiple times. And two-thirds of
dyads (4 out of 6) with both children at or
above Level 3 solved it multiple times. These
differences were significant, X2(2) = 7.73, p <
.05. Thus, for dyads to re-achieve solution,
suggesting that their solutions were purpose-
ful and intentionally coordinated, at least one
child in the pair had to be able to represent
others as causing their own behavior.
Discussion
Cooperation between young peers de-
pends on the joint coordination of social be-
havior between social novices. Although it is
clear that children cooperate with adults very
early, even in the first year (e.g., Ross & Kay,
1980; Ross & Lollis, 1987), the first instances
of systematic, coordinated, thematic peer-
peer cooperation do not appear until the sec-
ond half of the second year. Why is that?'It
has been suggested here that fundamental
cognitive or social-cognitive abilities may be
a necessary part of this transition into skilled
peer interaction. That is, while a parent can
"scaffold" an infant into successful joint en-
gagement, giving the appearance of infant
skill where it may be only very rudimentary,
the burden falls on young peers to mutually
manage their own interactions based on their
actual skill and understanding.
As the findings have indicated, at 12
months children were unable to cooperate to
solve a simple problem. Eighteen-month-olds
were just beginning to evidence some basic
collaborative abilities, but their performance
was uneven, and cooperation was infrequent
and apparently serendipitous. Rather than
planfully coordinating behavior to achieve so-
lution, it appeared that they simply happened
to notice the effects of the other child's ma-
Brownell and Carriger 1171
nipulations and opportunistically exploited
their advantage.
That there were no age differences in la-
tency to the first solution suggests that this
characterization may also fit the 24- and 30-
month-olds. However, at the latter two ages
children solved the problem two or more
times after the first solution, whereas those
18-month-olds who did solve it could not re-
achieve a solution. Further, for the older chil-
dren subsequent solutions were achieved
more quickly than the first. This pattern sug-
gests purposeful, jointly regulated coordina-
tion of behavior among the 24- and 30-month-
olds, but not among the younger children.
This suggestion gains additional cre-
dence from the finding that older children
more often produced coordinated behavior
than did 12- or 18-month-olds. That is, they
were more likely to manipulate the handle
with a pause for the other child to respond, to
anticipate or to wait for the other child's ac-
tion on the task, to give gestural or vocal di-
rections to the partner about problem-related
behavior, and to comply with the partner's di-
rections. Older children also moved to posi-
tions opposite one another at the task more
often, positions necessary for solution, and in-
dicative of the ability to adopt complementary
behavioral roles. Although 30-month-olds no
doubt command better planning and self-
regulation skills than do 24-month-olas, as
well as more complex representationL of self
and other, the simplicity of the cooperation
task used in the present study did not permit
the demonstration of such differences. Hence,
one profitable direction for future endeavors
may be to provide greater detail about how
these basic abilities change after their emer-
gence between 18 and 24 months.
How do the cooperative problem-solving
skills documented here compare with cooper-
ation in spontaneous social interaction be-
tween young peers? Research has concen-
trated on cooperative or thematic play and
games (Brenner & Mueller, 1982; Bronson,
1981; Eckerman & Stein, 1982; Eckerman et
al., 1989; Goldman & Ross, 1978; Howes,
1987, 1988; Ross, 1982), all of which contain
some element of behavioral coordination be-
tween peer partners, as well as shared under-
standing of interactional content. Previous
investigators have noted that to establish
cooperative play with another, children must
communicate their intentions, understand the
peer's signals and intentions, establish a joint
topic and roles, and regulate the temporal
structure of the interchange (Eckerman &
Stein, 1982; Ross, 1982). The games and
1172 Child Development
shared themes that begin to emerge at about
18 months are more advanced than earlier
and simpler contingent exchanges because of
the children's recognition of their related
roles and their attempts to maintain interac-
tions around a single, mutually recognized
theme. Thus, cooperative problem solving in
the current study requires skills that are simi-
lar in many ways to those involved in the
games and thematic social play that appear
during the latter half of the second year.
However, it is also clear that social play
does not require the same amount of plan-
ning, the same understanding of interpersonal
causal relations, and the precision of coordi-
nation that is required by cooperative prob-
lem solving. To play a game of ball or chase,
or a mutual imitation game, does indeed re-
quire both children to subordinate their indi-
vidual behavior to a dyadic theme and to se-
quence their behavior temporally to maintain
the theme. But there is a great deal of latitude
in the particular behaviors the children can
individually produce within any given dyadic
theme, and there are few necessary causal re-
lations between the two children's behavior.
It would be legitimate, for example, to turn
a game of ball into a game of chase and still
be viewed as achieving the common goal of
maintaining joint focus and keeping the ex-
change going. And interactional roles can be,
and often are, imitative rather than com-
plementary (Eckerman et al., 1989).
In contrast, the cooperative problem-
solving task in the present study required the
children to adopt particular, fairly narrowly
defined roles both spatially and temporally,
which were necessarily complementary.
There is little leeway in such a situation for
alternate forms of behavior that can equally
well achieve the joint goal. The goal itself,
moreover, is specified for the children in
cooperative problem solving rather than spon-
taneously invented and re-invented as in
play. Finally, in a successful solution, one
child's behavior is not only temporally related
to the other child's, it also is causally related
to the achievement of the solution. Hence, it
is not altogether surprising that while simple
games and shared themes emerge in peer
play at 18 months, the more demanding coop-
eration skills studied here do not appear until
24 months.
Parallels exist, however, if we restrict
comparisons to children's complementary
role relations in peer play. In both cross-
sectional and longitudinal samples, Howes
(1988) reported marked increases in com-
plementary/reciprocal peer play at 24 months.
Similarly, Eckerman (Eckerman et al., 1989)
reported that although young toddlers pre-
dominantly imitate one another during
games, at 28 months they also begin to incor-
porate complex complementary behavior into
their games. These latter games seemed "to
reuire ways of directing another's behavior in
addition to . . . imitation" (p. 449). In other
work on young children's cooperative prob-
lem solving, it was found that 24-month-olds
adopted complementary behavioral roles, but
18-month-olds could not unless they were di-
rected to do so by their 24-month-old partners
(Brownell, 1989). It appears, then, that chil-
dren's ability to manage complex social be-
havior that is different from but thematically
related to a partner's may emerge at 24 to 30
months in both peer freeplay and in the more
constrained setting of cooperative problem
solving.
One potential limitation on the breadth of
our conclusions is the possibility that our re-
sults are unique to this class of cooperation
problems. Although we used three different
cooperation tasks to avoid confounding the re-
sults with a particular task, the possibility re-
mains that these physical world problems are
not representative of the social-cognitive de-
mands made by cooperation more generally.
However, correspondences with other inves-
tigators' findings of similar age-related pat-
terns in unstructured social play (reviewed
above) provide indirect evidence for the va-
lidity of our tasks. Additionally, all children
in the present study manipulated the tasks ap-
propriately to achieve an individual solution
had the barriers and springs not prevented it.
And recent research has confirmed that even
12-month-olds can solve compound means-
ends problems (Willatts & Rosie, 1989), sug-
gesting that our tasks were not too cognitively
complex. Nevertheless, it would be informa-
tive to compare the performance of young
children across a wider variety of cooperation
tasks, settings, and partners.
Other important questions revolve
around the factors that influence the emer-
gence and development of these early forms
of cooperation, particularly when cooperation
involves the adoption of complementary
roles. In the present study it was found that
children who were better able to cooperate
also were better able to represent others'
agency, consistent with the hypothesis moti-
vating the study.
The research design of this study does
not, of course, permit us to address the ques-

tion of whether self-other differentiation is a
prerequisite for cooperation. It can only show
that the two processes are developmentally
related to one another. It is possible that both
cooperation and decentration are determined
by a different, still more fundamental age-
related change. Alternatively, they may be
separately caused by independent mecha-
nisms that both happen to coincide closely
with age. Others have demonstrated, for ex-
ample, that between 18 and 24 months chil-
dren begin to make causal inferences and to
evidence foresight (Kagan, 1981; McCall,
Eichorn, & Hogarty, 1977; Wachs & Hubert,
1981), both apparent requirements of cooper-
ative problem solving. Perhaps the empirical
relation between self-other understanding
and cooperation during the second year is a
simple by-product of the many other age-
related changes that occur during this period.
It is also possible that cognitive changes
such as those entailed in self-other differ-
entiation derive from experience in coopera-
tive social encounters that force the young
child to consider others' perspectives. Hence,
certain kinds of social experiences may serve
as a context for certain cognitive develop-
ments rather than vice versa as often as-
sumed.
Finally, as Hinde and Bateson (1984)
have cogently argued, it is altogether possible
that apparent discontinuities in development,
such as the emergence of self-other differ-
entiation or cooperation, may be produced by
continuous rather than discontinuous changes
at underlying levels of organization. Although
evidence for behavioral reorganization often
comes from patterns of correlations (as in the
present study), such patterns can be ex-
plained in numerous ways, not always having
to do with changes in psychological structure.
We may be misled, then, if we continue to
assume that "a behavioral act is isomorphic
with an underlying structure" (Hinde & Bate-
son, 1984). Longitudinal research on the indi-
vidual components of cooperative problem
solving, as well as on conceptually related as-
pects of self-other understanding, will be nec-
essary to clarify the actual nature of the corre-
spondences detected in this study.
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