The development of social attunement

In this project, we aim to understand how infants socially attune to the behaviour of others such as their caregivers. Rather than looking for a developmental timeline in which certain social behaviours develop over the months, we investigate how social behaviours such as gaze following and imitation can emerge from the social context on various timescales by using microgenetic research designs. We aspire to describe the development of social attunement in terms of iterativity, emergence, and co-regulation with social actors. As such, we hope to describe social attunement at the level of social synergy, rather than the social behaviour of the infant in isolation of its social environment.

Main project

This project is part of project "Dynamics and complexity of human behavior and cognition".

Researchers and partners

Behavioural and Social Sciences, Psychology

• dr. R.F.A (Ralf) Cox, Developmental Psychology

Partners outside of the University of Groningen

• Dr. Fred Hasselman, department of developmental psychology, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands