Social contingency and infants’ sense of agency

From birth onwards, both infants and caregivers are highly attuned to each other, and this period is very sensitive for the establishment of social relations, a basic need that must be met for infants to survive and thrive. Naturalistic observational studies argue that caregivers’ contingent responses are the cradle of a core aspects of development, namely infants’ sense of agency that refers to the experience of being in control of one’s actions and the outcomes they produce. Once emerged, infants’ sense of agency has cascading effects for many other developments, including communication and language development.

In this line of research, we focus on both naturalistic caregiver-infant interaction from different cultural contexts and innovative experimental designs to analyze the interactional dynamics and psychological mechanisms underlying the emergence of infants’ sense of agency in the first months of life.

• Current projects

  iSmile (DFG) – The effects of caregivers on infant smiling behavior and development

  Interplay (WiRe) – Agency, active learning, and contingencies in early language development

• Selected publications:

  Kärtner, J., Schwick, M.*, Wefers, H & Nomikou, I. (2022). Interactional preludes to infants’ affective climax. Infant Behavior and Development, 67, 101715. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101715                                                                             * shared first author

  Kärtner, J., Schuhmacher, N. & Giner Torréns, M. (2020). Social-cognitive development across cultures. Progress in Brain Research, 258, 225–246. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.pbr.2020.06.011

  Kärtner, J. (2015). The autonomous developmental pathway: The primacy of subjective mental states for human behavior and experience. Child Development, 86, 1298–1309.