Social Interaction in Infancy

From birth on, infants are astonishingly well equipped to get in touch with the social world. Basic forms of social interaction shape the relationships between infants and their caregivers from early on and become continuously more sophisticated throughout the first year of life. By the second year, infants have acquired important developmental milestones of simple (perception-goal) folk psychology and shared intentionality. Around their fourth birthday, children develop a full-blown explicit meta-representational Theory of Mind, an essential foundation for successful social interaction. This standard picture of the development of social interaction has been questioned by research suggesting false-belief competence earlier in infancy. Yet, developments of recent years remind us to be careful in drawing strong conclusions on what infants can and cannot do on relatively thin empirical grounds. As in the case of neonatal imitation (and probably also fetal face preference, see Scheel et al., 2018), recent replication studies challenge the early competence view. Looking to the future, collaborative approaches implementing methodological rigour promise to generate solid knowledge on the development of social cognition and social interaction in infancy.