Download Contingent reactivity and communication in infancy and beyond

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.