Communication in Infancy: Mutual Regulation of Affect and Attention

Beginning in the 1970s, a view has been expressed that young infants exhibit a natural ability for “intersubjectivity”, or an effective mind knowledge, and show an early ability to engage in communication with other psychological beings. This view has caused vigorous debate amongst psychologists who argue that early social interaction by human infants cannot be called true communication for a variety of reasons. Infant communication seen as entailing a perception of the other as a psychological recipient and partner is clearly antithetical to prevailing cognitive developmental approaches which view communication as mediated by late developing cognitions about mental states. Recently some writers have attempted a rapprochement by positing infant communication at the very end of the first year and in the second year as revealing good evidence of mental state understanding. However, the intersubjective status of infant communication in the first year, and especially in the first half of the first year, is still viewed with extreme scepticism. This scepticism is especially interesting given the wide acceptance of claims about the infant’s knowledge of physical realities in the early months. Part of the resistance is due to a prevailing discomfort with the idea that early sociality originates from anything other than a starting point of asociality. It is also due in part to our continuing acceptance of the proposition that things mental, being invisible, are graspable only conceptually and with difficulty. The approach favoured in this paper views intersubjectivity as possible through an engagement of affects and attention.