Caregivers' goals influence their interactions with their children. In this preregistered study, we examined whether directing parents to "teach" their baby versus "learn" from their baby influenced the extent to which they engaged in intrusive (e.g., controlling, adult-centered rather than child-centered), sensitive, warm, or…

Early mother-infant coordinated interactions play a critical role in infant development. The present study describes the development of the dyadic coordination of vocalization and gaze behavior between mothers and infants over the first year of life. In addition to describing developmental trajectories of behavior, the study contributes to our…

Prior studies of mother-infant interaction have generally used a variable-centered approach to associate face-to-face communication with psychosocial outcomes. Herein, we use a person-centered approach to identify clusters of infants who exhibit similar behavioral profiles during face-to-face communication with their mothers. Four infant…

A fundamental question about the development of communication behavior in early life is how infants acquire adaptive communication behavior that is well-suited to their individual social environment, and how the experience of parent-child communication affects this development. The current study investigated how infants develop communication…

The study of infants' interactive style and social stress response to repeated stress exposures is of great interest for developmental and clinical psychologists. Stable maternal and dyadic behavior is critical to sustain infants' development of an adaptive social stress response, but the association between infants' interactive style and social…

Infants' motor skill development triggers changes in parent-infant interactions, exploration, and play behaviors, particularly during periods of locomotor transitions. We investigated how these transitions reorganized infants' and mothers' explorations of spatial layouts. Thirteen infants and their mothers were followed biweekly from the age of 6…

The still-face paradigm (SFP) was designed to assess infant expectations that parents will respond to infant communicative signals. During the still-face (SF) episode, the parent ceases interaction and maintains a neutral expression. Original, qualitative descriptions of infant behavior suggested changes within the SF episode: infants decrease…

The current study tested whether the purely amodal cue of contingency elicits orientation following behavior in 8-month-old infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with automated objects without human features that did or did not react contingently to the infants' fixations recorded by an eye tracker. We found that an object's occasional…

Used an event-based approach to study the nature of coordination in 3- and 6-month olds during interaction with their caregivers. Found that infants coordinated their vocalizations and facial actions more than expected by chance. When two communicative events were temporally associated across modalities, one event tended to be embedded within the…