This paper provides a practical, hands-on introduction to cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA), diagonal cross-recurrence profiles (DCRP), and multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis (MdRQA) in R. These methods have enjoyed increasing popularity in the cognitive and social sciences since a recognition that many behavioral and neurophysiological processes are intrinsically time dependent and reliant on environmental and social context has emerged. Recurrence-based methods are particularly suited for time-series that are non-stationary or have complicated dynamics, such as longer recordings of continuous physiological or movement data, but are also useful in the case of time-series of symbolic data, as in the case of text/verbal transcriptions or categorically coded behaviors. In the past, they have been used to assess changes in the dynamics of, or coupling between physiological and behavioral measures, for example in joint action research to determine the co-evolution of the behavior between individuals in dyads or groups, or for assessing the strength of coupling/correlation between two or more time-series. In this paper, we provide readers with a conceptual introduction, followed by a step-by-step explanation on how the analyses are performed in R with a summary of the current best practices of their application.

Gaze is one of the first and most important means of communication and coordination in parent-infant dyads. In the present paper we used a novel method, designed to discover patterns in time-series, to investigate the dynamics of gaze in dyads and its developmental change. Using a longitudinal corpus of natural interactions, mutual mother-infant gaze was coded when the infants were 3, 6, and 8 months old and subjected to recurrence analysis. The cross-recurrence profiles obtained for the three time points show systematic differences: While the engagement in mutual gaze decreases with age, the behaviour becomes more tightly coupled as a more regular temporal structure emerges. We suggest that this stronger interdependency of gaze behaviour may indicate the development of a social feedback loop enabling engagement in interaction.

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Continuous interaction of mother and infant in the first weeks and months of an infant's life entrains the infant on many crucial aspects of how to do things together. Contingencies of gaze, vocalizations, and other movements are slowly routinized; this scaffolds directing of attention to each other and the world and gives to such multimodal interactions meaning. It is within these continuous interactions with caregivers that language emerges, starting from the first nonreflexive vocalizations that infants produce. The response that caregivers promptly give to these vocalizations informs infants of their relevance and helps shape them. We explored this systematicity by observing the coupling of infants' and mothers' vocalizations in unconstrained interactions longitudinally. While at three months, mothers seem to answer consistently to any speech related vocalization within the first two seconds, this pattern fades away at six and eight months. What remains stable across age is a structure in which overlapping vocalizations are rare and give way to a sequential pattern of vocal reciprocity-an embryonic turn-taking behavior. Discussion relates this finding to early coordination in other modalities in an attempt to sketch a more holistic account of emerging co-action.

Dynamical systems approaches to social coordination underscore how participants' local actions give rise to and maintain global interactive patterns and how, in turn, they are also shaped by them. Developmental research can deliver important insights into both processes: (1) the stabilization of ways of interacting, and (2) the gradual shaping of the agentivity of the individuals. In this article we propose that infants' agentivity develops out of participation, i.e., acting a part in an interaction system. To investigate this development this article focuses on the ways in which participation in routinized episodes may shape infant's agentivity in social events. In contrast to existing research addressing more advanced forms of participating in social routines, our goal was to assess infants' early participation as evidence of infants' agentivity. In our study, 19 Polish mother–infant dyads were filmed playing peekaboo when the infants were 4 and 6 months of age. We operationalized infants' participation in the peekaboo in terms of their use of various behaviors across modalities during specific phases of the game: We included smiles, vocalizations, and attempts to cover and uncover themselves or their mothers. We hypothesized that infants and mothers would participate actively in the routine by regulating their behavior so as to adhere to the routine format. Furthermore, we hypothesized that infants who experienced more scaffolding would be able to adopt a more active role in the routine. We operationalized scaffolding as mothers' use of specific peekaboo structures that allowed infants to anticipate when it was their turn to act. Results suggested that infants as young as 4 months of age engaged in peekaboo and took up turns in the game, and that their participation increased at 6 months of age. Crucially, our results suggest that infants' behavior was organized by the global structure of the peekaboo game, because smiles, vocalizations, and attempts to uncover occurred significantly more often during specific phases rather than being evenly distributed across the whole interaction. Furthermore, the way mothers structured the game at 4 months predicted infant participation at both 4 and 6 months of age.