Joint perceptual decision-making: a case study in explanatory pluralism.

Traditionally different approaches to the study of cognition have been viewed as competing explanatory frameworks. An alternative view, explanatory pluralism, regards different approaches to the study of cognition as complementary ways of studying the same phenomenon, at specific temporal and spatial scales, using appropriate methodological tools. Explanatory pluralism has been often described abstractly, but has rarely been applied to concrete cases. We present a case study of explanatory pluralism. We discuss three separate ways of studying the same phenomenon: a perceptual decision-making task (Bahrami et al., 2010), where pairs of subjects share information to jointly individuate an oddball stimulus among a set of distractors. Each approach analyzed the same corpus but targeted different units of analysis at different levels of description: decision-making at the behavioral level, confidence sharing at the linguistic level, and acoustic energy at the physical level. We discuss the utility of explanatory pluralism for describing this complex, multiscale phenomenon, show ways in which this case study sheds new light on the concept of pluralism, and highlight good practices to critically assess and complement approaches

Associations between infant–mother physiological synchrony and 4- and 6-month-old infants’ emotion regulation

In this study we assessed whether physiological synchrony between infants and mothers contributes to infants’ emotion regulation following a mild social stressor. Infants between 4 and 6 months of age and their mothers were tested in the face-to-face-still-face paradigm and were assessed for behavioral and physiological self-regulation during and following the stressor. Physiological synchrony was calculated from a continuous measure of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) enabling us to cross-correlate the infants’ and mothers’ RSA responses. Without considering physiological synchrony, the evidence suggested that infants’ distress followed the prototypical pattern of increasing during the Still Face episode and then decreasing during the reunion episode. Once physiological synchrony was added to the model, we observed that infants’ emotion regulation improved if mother–infant synchrony was positive, but not if it was negative. This result was qualified further by whether or not infants suppressed their RSA response during the Still Face episode. In sum, these findings highlight how individual differences in infants’ physiological responses contribute significantly to their self-regulation abilities

Head and eyes: Looking behavior in 12- to 24-month-old infants

This study demonstrates evidence for a foundational process underlying active vision in older infants during object play. Using head-mounted eye-tracking and motion capture, looks to an object are shown to be tightly linked to and synchronous with a stilled head, regardless of the duration of gaze, for infants 12 to 24 months of age. Despite being a developmental period of rapid and marked changes in motor abilities, the dynamic coordination of head stabilization and sustained gaze to a visual target is developmentally invariant during the examined age range. The findings indicate that looking with an aligned head and eyes is a fundamental property of human vision and highlights the importance of studying looking behavior in freely moving perceivers in everyday contexts, opening new questions about the role of body movement in both typical and atypical development of visual attention

A Method for Measuring Dynamic Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) in Infants and Mothers

The measurement of respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA) in infants, children and adults is critical to the study of physiological regulation, and more recently, interpersonal physiological covariation, but it has been impeded by methods that limit its resolution to 30 s or longer. Recent analytical developments have suggested methods for studying dynamic RSA in adults, and we have extended this work to the study of infants and mothers. In the current paper, we describe a new analytical strategy for estimating RSA time series for infants and adults. Our new method provides a means for studying physiological synchrony in infant-mother dyads that offers some important advantages relative to existing methods that use inter-beat-intervals (e.g. Feldman, Magori-Cohen, Galili, Singer, & Louzoun, 2011). In the middle sections of this paper, we offer a brief tutorial on calculating RSA continuously with a sliding window and review the empirical evidence for determining the optimal window size. In order to confirm the reliability of our results, we briefly discuss testing synchrony by randomly shuffling the dyads to control for spurious correlations, and also by using a bootstrapping technique for calculating confidence intervals in the cross-correlation function. One important implication that emerges from applying this method is that it is possible to measure both positive and negative physiological synchrony and that these categorical measures are differentially predictive of future outcomes

Infants’ Social Communication from a Predictive Processing Perspective

Predictive Processing (PP) has been suggested to account for early cognitive development (Köster et al., 2020). In this paper, we extend its application to early social coordination in parent-infant interactions. Interpersonal neural synchrony in parent-child interactions is hypothesized to be a function of the coupling of internal generative models for mutual prediction. By aligning these internal models and reducing prediction errors, social uncertainty is reduced, and interpersonal neural synchrony is enhanced. Support for this hypothesis is provided by assessing neural synchrony during mother-infant interaction

Complexity matching in dyadic conversation

Recent studies of dyadic interaction have examined phenomena of synchronization, entrainment, alignment, and convergence. All these forms of behavioral matching have been hypothesized to play a supportive role in establishing coordination and common ground between interlocutors. In the present study, evidence is found for a new kind of coordination termed complexity matching. Temporal dynamics in conversational speech signals were analyzed through time series of acoustic onset events. Timing in periods of acoustic energy was found to exhibit behavioral matching that reflects complementary timing in turn-taking. In addition, acoustic onset times were found to exhibit power law clustering across a range of timescales, and these power law functions were found to exhibit complexity matching that is distinct from behavioral matching. Complexity matching is discussed in terms of interactive alignment and other theoretical principles that lead to new hypotheses about information exchange in dyadic conversation and interaction in general