The parent?infant dyad and the construction of the subjective self

Developmental psychology and psychopathology has in the past been more concerned with the quality of self-representation than with the development of the subjective agency which underpins our experience of feeling, thought and action, a key function of mentalisation. This review begins by contrasting a Cartesian view of pre-wired introspective subjectivity with a constructionist model based on the assumption of an innate contingency detector which orients the infant towards aspects of the social world that react congruently and in a specifically cued informative manner that expresses and facilitates the assimilation of cultural knowledge. Research on the neural mechanisms associated with mentalisation and social influences on its development are reviewed. It is suggested that the infant focuses on the attachment figure as a source of reliable information about the world. The construction of the sense of a subjective self is then an aspect of acquiring knowledge about the world through the caregiver's pedagogical communicative displays which in this context focuses on the child's thoughts and feelings. We argue that a number of possible mechanisms, including complementary activation of attachment and mentalisation, the disruptive effect of maltreatment on parent-child communication, the biobehavioural overlap of cues for learning and cues for attachment, may have a role in ensuring that the quality of relationship with the caregiver influences the development of the child's experience of thoughts and feelings

Staring at the page: the functions of gaze in a young child’s interpretation of symbolic forms

This article argues that young children are capable of complex abstract reasoning which is rooted in their physical and emotional engagement with the world. It suggests that even apparently commonplace representative objects are not transparent, and children are faced with a major interpretative problem when becoming familiar with symbolic images and objects. It also suggests that young children are motivated by an expectation of significance about the symbolic systems they encounter, including systems of low modality like writing. Their interpretative activity is mediated through physical and bodily resources, of which gaze is of major significance to sighted children when reasoning about visual, spatial modes of symbolic representation. The article presents a micro-semiotic, multimodal analysis of a small section of video film in which a two year old child is engaged, with her father, in drawing and marking: representing and interpreting graphic signs. Three functions of gaze are identified during this activity: analytic, interpersonal and expressive. The systematic and motivated coordination of these types of gaze with other bodily modes, including language, is shown. The article concludes that the boundaries between young children’s bodily and cognitive activity can be seen to be flexible, making many of their processes of reasoning and interpretation about systems of symbolic representation accessible to description