Contingency and Synchrony: Interactional Pathways Toward Attentional Control and Intentional Communication

In this article we examine how contingency and synchrony during infant–caregiver interactions help children learn to pay attention to objects and how this, in turn, affects their ability to direct caregivers’ attention and to track communicative intentions in others. First, we present evidence that, early in life, child–caregiver interactions are asymmetric. Caregivers dynamically and contingently adapt to their child more than the other way around, providing higher-order semantic and contextual cues during attention episodes, which facilitate the development of specialized and integrated attentional brain networks in the infant brain. Then, we describe how social contingency also facilitates the child's development of predictive models and, through that, goal-directed behavior. Finally, we discuss how contingency and synchrony of brain and behavior can drive children's ability to direct their caregivers’ attention voluntarily and how this, in turn, paves the way for intentional communication.