Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human interaction involves the organization of a collection ofsensorimotor systems across space and time. The study ofhow coordination develops in child-parent interaction hasprimarily focused on understanding the development ofspecific coordination patterns from individual modalities.However, less work has taken a systems view andinvestigated the development of coordination among multipleinterdependent behaviors. In the present work, we usedGranger causality as a mathematical model to constructdyadic causal networks of multimodal data collected from alongitudinal study of child-parent interaction. At a group-level, we observed increases in the number of causal links andin the strength of such links in dyadic interaction from 9-months to 12-months. At an individual-level, we observedhigh variability in the types of causal links that emergedacross developmental ages. We discuss these results in termsof a multicausality hypothesis for the development of humancoordination.