Ponente invitad@: Sam Wass. From contingency to synchrony? How multilevel hierarchical contingencies across salience and semantics organise infant-caregiver joint attention

What:From contingency to synchrony? How multilevel hierarchical contingencies across salience and semantics organise infant-caregiver joint attention

Where: BCBL Auditorium and Auditorium zoom room (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Professor Sam Wass. PhD, Department of Psychology & Human Development, School of Childhood and Social Care, University of East London, UK

When:  Thursday,  May 15th at 12:00 PM noon.

We know that children learn more effectively from face-to-face interactions than from screens. But we still understand relatively little about the dynamic, adaptive processes through which inter-personal contingency during face-to-face interactions enhances attention and learning. In this talk, I discuss how social signals during early interactions operate across multiple hierarchical levels, ranging from low-level salience cues to higher-order features. Specifically, I examine how mothers dynamically and reciprocally adjust their behaviours across these levels in response to their infants' attention during play. I present results from studies that recorded dual EEG and multi-modal, behavioural features during live face-to-face interactions between children and their parents. Using time-series analyses, we assessed moment-by-moment associations between infant attention and both lower-order features (e.g., spectral flux of ambient noise and maternal vocalizations, maternal face and hand movement) and higher-order features (e.g., speech information rate, facial expression novelty, semantic surprisal, and toy naming). Our findings indicate that maternal behaviours are both driven by and predictive of infant attention, and that, even from early development, attention and learning involves interactive processes which unfold across multiple separable levels, from salience to semantics.