Infants’ sensitivity to the predictability of exchanged actions in socially contingent exchanges: the contingency cube

Previous studies on social contingency have revealed that young infants
are sensitive to the consistent temporal pairing of contingent responses and
can draw various, evolutionarily relevant inferences from it. For example,
when infants identify that it is highly probable for an unfamiliar entity
to produce temporally contingent responses to another agent’s actions,
they can infer that the reactive entity is an intentional agent, even if it
shows no other cues of agency. However, the consistent temporal pairing
of contingently exchanged actions is not sufficient to account for the full
range of inferences induced by contingent social reactivity. Based on recent
findings, I argue that recognizing socially contingent interactions relies
on the sensitivity to the predictability of subsequent actions along three
dimensions. I propose that young infants monitor ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’
response actions are produced. By tracking these three factors, infants can
represent the relatedness of subsequent actions exhibited by interacting
social partners, guiding their contingency-based inferences, including those
that have traditionally been viewed as independent of social contingency.
I conjecture that the cognitive mechanism to monitor the predictability of
exchanged actions may have become further specialized during human
evolution, enabling social partners to engage in complex cooperative and
communicative interactions.