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Contingent reactivity and communication in infancy and beyond Infants seem to be equipped with a contingency detection mechanism that tracks the statistical relation between a behavior and the effects of this behavior in the environment. They are not only able to detect all the small changes in the effects of their behavior: such cues allow them to qualify their interactions and evaluate whether they are good instances of social contacts. Thus, infants seem to have access to a dedicated system that is able to process contingency patterns that signal the presence of an agent. It is not clear, however, whether infants can go beyond their agency identification while searching for communicative partners. A series of results that we recently obtained can contribute to the clarification of these questions. In an eye-tracking paradigm developed to examine agency attribution we found that contingent reactivity elicited by infants’ incidental leg kicking is interpreted as cue for communicative intention. Specifically, infants followed the orientation change of an object significantly more often if this object reacted contingently to their behavior, than that of noncontingent objects. Further, we explored whether the orientation of the contingently moving objects is interpreted referentially. Referential expectations following these experimental manipulations marked the interactions as communicative: infants showed biases specific to ostensive-referential communication, even though no human agent was actually present. These effects support the presence of sophisticated inferences triggered by contingency detection already in preverbal infants. Finally, in order to elucidate the role played by different cognitive mechanism involved in this process we transformed this paradigm into a video game and adapted it to preschool age children. Using this paradigm we analyzed the differential reactions of normally developing children and children with autism. Detecting and interpreting contingent reactivity has a specific role in infants' early interactions. Very early on infants seem to have access to a system that gains its input from contingency detection mechanism and is dedicated to the identification of social interactions. Being amodal, this system conveys a higher flexibility in identifying potential social partners even if human specific cues of communicative agency are not available.