This claim is far from being

uncontroversial. According to the social cognitive perspective, the ability to be jointly engaged with a partner is brought about by a strong reorganization of infant mind—the so-called 9-month cognitive revolution (Tomasello, 1995a, 1995b, 1999)—occurring at around the end of the first year of life, owing to the emergence of the infant’s understanding of other persons as intentional agents. Therefore, that ability is viewed as a sudden achievement that appears in quite an abrupt way and pushes infants from the dyadic to the triadic period. Recent research has Galunisertib molecular weight challenged this view. Infants younger than 9 months of age actively

coordinate their attention between people and objects (Flom & Pick, 2005; Striano & Bertin, 2005; Striano, Stahl, & Cleveland, 2009) and even 3-month-olds can appreciate the triadic situation if they are provided with a facilitated condition, such as when the adult’s gaze on an object is coordinated with the infant’s gaze (Striano & Stahl, 2005). The few neurophysiological data available so far are also consistent with the above findings, as 5-month-olds’ attention to an object, measured as activation of neural correlates, was higher in joint attention Lapatinib supplier condition, where the experimenter alternated her gaze from the object to the infant’s eyes, than in nonjoint attention condition (Parise, Reid, Stets, & Striano, 2007), and 4-month-olds exhibited enhanced neural processing when looking at an object at which the adult did not look compared with the

object the adult looked at, suggesting that the cued object is perceived as more familiar than the uncued one (Reid, Striano, Kaufman, & Johnson, 2004). Overall, infants appear to be sensitive to key components of triadic interaction very early in development. It is thus hard to argue for a sharp discontinuity between the dyadic and triadic HSP90 period owing to the alleged sociocognitive shift. Instead, infants’ earlier appreciation of rudimentary aspects of triadic interactions in the dyadic period could represent the first step in joint attention development (Moore, 1996; Striano & Rochat, 1999; Striano & Stahl, 2005), giving it the nature of a process that is “nurtured during the early period of face-to-face play and expands during the emergence of the triadic interactive system” (Bakeman & Adamson, 1984, p. 1288). Indeed, recent literature supports the continuity perspective (Müller, Carpendale, Budwig, & Sokol, 2008).