Endogenous oscillatory rhythms and interactive contingencies jointly influence infant attention during early infant-caregiver interaction

Abstract

Almost all early cognitive development takes place in social contexts. At the moment, however, we know little about the neural and cognitive mechanisms that drive infant attention during social interactions. Recording EEG during naturalistic caregiver-infant interactions (N=66), we compare two different accounts. Attentional scaffolding perspectives emphasise the role of the caregiver in structuring the child’s behaviour, whilst active learning models focus on motivational factors, endogenous to the infant, that guide their attention. Our results show that, already by 12-months, intrinsic cognitive processes control infants’ attention: fluctuations in endogenous oscillatory neural activity associated with changes in infant attentiveness, and predicted the length of infant attention episodes towards objects. In comparison, infant attention was not forwards-predicted by caregiver gaze, or modulations in the spectral and temporal properties of their caregiver’s speech. Instead, caregivers rapidly modulated their behaviours in response to changes in infant attention and cognitive engagement, and greater reactive changes associated with longer infant attention. Our findings suggest that shared attention develops through interactive but asymmetric, infant-led processes that operate across the caregiver-child dyad.