Moving developmental social neuroscience toward a second-person approach

Abstract

Infants’ cognitive development and learning rely profoundly on their interactions with other people. In the first year, infants become increasingly sensitive to others’ gaze and use it to focus their own attention on relevant visual input. However, infants are not passive observers in early social interactions, and these exchanges are characterized by high levels of contingency and reciprocity. Wass and colleagues offer first insights into the neurobehavioral dynamics of caregiver–infant interactions, demonstrating that caregivers’ scalp-recorded theta band activity responds to their infant’s changes in attention, and parental brain activation is associated with infants’ sustenance of attention. This research opens up entirely new ways of exploring caregiver–infant interactions and to understand early social attention as a reciprocal and dynamic process.