An interactionist perspective on the development of coordinated social attention

Abstract

Infants' ability to coordinate their attention with other people develops profoundly across the first year of life. Mainly based on experimental research focusing on infants' behavior under highly controlled conditions, developmental milestones were identified and explained in the past by prominent theories in terms of the onset of specific cognitive skills. In contrast to this approach, recent longitudinal research challenges this perspective with findings suggesting that social attention develops continuously with a gradual refinement of skills. Informed by these findings, we argue for an interactionist and dynamical systems view that bases observable advances in infant social attention skills on increasingly fine-tuned mutual adjustments in the caregiver infant dyad, resulting in gradually improving mutual prediction. We present evidence for this view from recent studies leveraging new technologies which afford the opportunity to dynamically track social interactions in real-time. These new technically-sophisticated studies offer unprecedented insights into the dynamic processes of infant-caregiver social attention. It is now possible to track in much greater detail fluctuations over time with regard to object-directed attention as well as social attention and how these processes relate to one another. Encouraged by these initial results and new insights from this interactionist developmental social neuroscience approach, we conclude with a 'call to action' in which we advocate for more ecologically valid paradigms for studying social attention as a dynamic and bi-directional process.

Interpersonal synchrony is associated with infants’ reactions to subtle changes in caregiver‐infant interactions

“…The argument that infants learn from and through interactive regularities is consistent with the predictive processing framework that has become a prominent model of cognitive neuroscience (Friston, 2010; Hoehl & Bertenthal, 2021). Accordingly, an organism constantly computes the probability of events in the environment based on sensory input and generates appropriate behavioural responses.…”

“…They may look longer at their mother to make appropriate predictions about her subsequent behaviour as well as to re‐initiate interpersonal synchrony. This process is rooted in the predictions that infants make about the social situations they find themselves in based on their interaction history (Beebe et al., 2016; Hoehl & Bertenthal, 2021).…”

“…To minimise prediction errors, the brain must increase the accuracy of its internal predictive models (Clark, 2013; Friston, 2010). Predictive processing has recently received much attention in developmental literature, where authors argue that infants build internal predictive models of their social environment and structure their behaviour and learning by updating these models through active and perceptual inference (e.g., Hoehl & Bertenthal, 2021; Köster et al., 2020). Infants generate internal predictive models by passively experiencing prediction errors and by actively engaging with their environment to test their predictions.…”

A Practical Guide to EEG Hyperscanning in Joint Action Research: From Motivation to Implementation

“…Other recent reviews have focused more specifically on EEG hyperscanning, outlining, for example, the scientific progress made by using hyperscanning to investigate continuous interactions in contexts of high ecological validity (Acquadro, Congedo, & De Riddeer, 2016) or the processes underlying cooperative versus competitive tasks (Balconi & Vanutelli, 2017). Still other reviews highlight specific applications of hyperscanning to further our understanding of creativity and the performing arts (e.g., Shemyakina & Nagornova, 2021), parent-child interactions (Hoehl & Bertenthal, 2021;Turk, Vroomen, Fonken, Levy, & van den Heuvel, 2022), and potential applications in areas such as motor rehabilitation (Short, Hernandez-Pavon, Jones, & Pons, 2021).…”

The role of mother-infant emotional synchrony in speech processing in 9-month-old infants

“…It has been proposed that sharing congruent emotions might provide an intersubjective foundation or a first medium of (Nicely et al, 1999). Notably, meaning is built through co-regulated coupling of behavior, including emotional expressions and vocalizations between two individuals (Hoehl & Bertenthal, 2021).…”