Why behaviour matters: Studying inter-brain coordination during child-caregiver interaction

Marriot Haresign, Ira; A.M., Phillips, Emily; V., Wass, Sam

doi:10.1016/j.dcn.2024.101384

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

2024

DOI: 10.1016/j.dcn.2024.101384

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Why behaviour matters: Studying inter-brain coordination during child-caregiver interaction

Ira Marriot Haresign,

Emily A.M., Phillips,

Sam V., Wass

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Cited by 2 publications

References 119 publications

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Contingency and Synchrony: Interactional Pathways Toward Attentional Control and Intentional Communication

Wass,

Phillips,

Haresign

et al. 2024

Annual Review of Developmental Psychology

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In this article we examine how contingency and synchrony during infant–caregiver interactions help children learn to pay attention to objects and how this, in turn, affects their ability to direct caregivers’ attention and to track communicative intentions in others. First, we present evidence that, early in life, child–caregiver interactions are asymmetric. Caregivers dynamically and contingently adapt to their child more than the other way around, providing higher-order semantic and contextual cues during attention episodes, which facilitate the development of specialized and integrated attentional brain networks in the infant brain. Then, we describe how social contingency also facilitates the child's development of predictive models and, through that, goal-directed behavior. Finally, we discuss how contingency and synchrony of brain and behavior can drive children's ability to direct their caregivers’ attention voluntarily and how this, in turn, paves the way for intentional communication.

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Contingency and Synchrony: Interactional Pathways Toward Attentional Control and Intentional Communication

Wass,

Phillips,

Haresign

et al. 2024

Annual Review of Developmental Psychology

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From behavioral synchrony to language and beyond

Eulau,

Hirsh-Pasek

2024

Front. Integr. Neurosci.

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Decades of research on joint attention, coordinated joint engagement, and social contingency identify caregiver-child interaction in infancy as a foundation for language. These patterns of early behavioral synchrony contribute to the structure and connectivity of the brain in the temporoparietal regions typically associated with language skills. Thus, children attune to their communication partner and subsequently build cognitive skills directly relating to comprehension and production of language, literacy skills, and beyond. This has yielded marked interest in measuring this contingent, synchronous social behavior neurally. Neurological measures of early social interactions between caregiver and child have become a hotbed for research. In this paper, we review that research and suggest that these early neural couplings between adults and children lay the foundation for a broader cognitive system that includes attention, problem solving, and executive function skills. This review describes the role of behavioral synchrony in language development, asks what the relationship is between neural synchrony and language growth, and how neural synchrony may play a role in the development of a broader cognitive system founded in a socially-gated brain. We address the known neural correlates of these processes with an emphasis on work that examines the tight temporal contingency between communicative partners during these rich social interactions, with a focus on EEG and fNIRS and brief survey of MRI and MEG.

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Why behaviour matters: Studying inter-brain coordination during child-caregiver interaction

Cited by 2 publications

References 119 publications

Contingency and Synchrony: Interactional Pathways Toward Attentional Control and Intentional Communication

Contingency and Synchrony: Interactional Pathways Toward Attentional Control and Intentional Communication

From behavioral synchrony to language and beyond

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