Keynotes Abstracts
The conference Perspectives on Child Development: Social Learning and Interaction brings together outstanding scholars delivering keynote lectures and participating in focused roundtable discussions. Below you will find abstracts of both types of sessions, offering insight into the topics that will shape our collective reflection on developmental processes, social cognition, and learning.
Testimony, Young children's selective trust: established findings and new questions
Paul Harris
Traditional accounts of cognitive development emphasized the importance of direct experience or so-called “hands-on” learning for young children. Yet there are many phenomena that children do not encounter directly. Children’s belief in the existence of ordinarily invisible scientific phenomena – for example, germs and viruses – as well as ordinarily invisible religious phenomena – for example, God and the afterlife – indicates that they do not always rely on first-hand experience. They also trust the testimony offered to them by other people. However, children are not indiscriminate in whom they believe – they tend to trust familiar and hitherto accurate informants rather than unfamiliar or inaccurate informants. They are also alert to subtle linguistic indices of uncertainty on the part of adult informants. Granted these various findings, I ask whether children assign a different status to scientific as compared to religious phenomena.
Toward a unified model of interpersonal synchrony: Insights from hyperscanning across dyads and contexts
Agnieszka Pluta, Alessandro Carollo, and SYNCC-IN team
Interpersonal synchrony underlies not only caregiver–child relationships but also friendships and romantic partnerships, shaping the quality of social bonds across contexts. Social interactions, integral to human life from its earliest days, form a cornerstone for satisfying our needs and guiding emotional, cognitive, and social development. In recent years, biobehavioral synchrony — the alignment of behavioral and affective states and biological rhythms between individuals — has been recognized as a key driver of socialization and emotional skills. For children, synchrony with caregivers fosters bonding which in turn supports lifelong learning, social integration, personal growth, well-being, and employability.
Differences in synchrony levels also appear across specific developmental groups. Preterm infants (born before 37 weeks of gestation) exhibit atypical synchrony patterns, likely due to immature biological systems, perinatal complications, and self-regulation difficulties—often compounded by parental mood disorders that impair interaction quality. By contrast, children on the autism spectrum show reduced motor and neural synchrony during social interactions, reflecting the communication and reciprocity challenges characteristic of autism. Research on biobehavioral synchrony thus contributes both to identifying objective biomarkers and to developing tailored therapeutic interventions for individuals within the neurodiverse spectrum.
In this context, it is essential to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms by which different levels of synchrony relate to one another and to later developmental outcomes across neurodiversity — and to translate that know-how into practical applications.
Yet, despite growing interest, research in this domain remains fragmented. Heterogeneity in dyad types, task designs, interaction dynamics, and—most critically—measurement modalities (ranging from behavioral and physiological indices to neural measures via electroencephalography and fNIRS) complicates cross-study comparisons and hinders the creation of a unified, theory-driven model of synchrony.
Developmental science: Convenient and colonial? A discussion inspired by the case of early language research
Ewa Haman, Przemek Tomalski and Zuzanna Laudańska
Developmental science in general and developmental psycholinguistics in particular aim to provide general and universal claims about developmental processes involved in language acquisition (and other domains). Yet, when planning, recruiting and analysing data, we most often rely on a selection of cultures and groups that are relatively easy to access (convenience sampling), typically being European or North American and well-educated (high SES), i.e. Global North. There is growing evidence that this leads to conclusions that should not be generalized to all cultures and all social strata, a problem most acutely visible in research coming from the Global South.
When applying our conclusions to everyday life (in designing interventions or informing public policies), we frequently rely on the assumption that they are equally applicable to any culture or language. This can be interpreted as colonizing science. Yet, the case of early language research acutely demonstrates how convenience and colonialism may lead to many cultures or social strata being systematically understudied and underrepresented in research.
In this panel we want to discuss the above claims, seek ways forward and reach conclusions that would enable us to moving our research towards truly more universal theories and models.
Attachment and information seeking across culture
Francisco Pons
I will introduce the concept of attachment by reviewing research conducted with children, and then I will continue with studies involving adults. I will present empirical data concerning attachment and information seeking among adults across cultures. Finally, I will conclude by discussing potential future research involving children.
Interactionist approach to attachment, parenting, and their eco-cultural environment
Katarzyna Lubiewska
Classic attachment theory offers a reductionist model of child (and human) development embedded in innate behavioral systems, reactive to parental influences, and taking place in a passive but structured environment. Nonetheless, recent studies reveal that the nature of both attachment and environment is rather interactionist than passive. Based on results of our recent studies investigating mechanisms operating between culture, parenting and attachment of school age children in various countries, my talk will present parents and children as agents in their response to eco-cultural and parental influences (respectively). To this end three well-recognized but less evidenced, theses will be introduced and supported by empirical evidences: Individual differences in child’s responsiveness to parental influences depends on the current state of “developmental achievements” of the child (Thesis 1); Child’s interpretation of provided parenting depends on the complex parenting context as well as its cultural context (Thesis 2); Parenting practices are embedded in eco-cultural environment, characterized (among others) by macro-economic and culture-related characteristics (Thesis 3). Presented theses will be discussed through the lens of the holistic perspective on contextual approach to attachment development.
The role of affective social learning in shaping individual attitudes toward the social world
Fabrice Clement
This talk explores how emotional expressions observed in others — particularly in early social environments — play a foundational role in shaping individual attitudes and guiding social behavior. Drawing on research in social and developmental psychology, affective science, and philosophy, the presentation introduces the concept of affective social learning as a process through which individuals internalize evaluative information embedded in the emotional reactions of others. These emotional cues function as implicit indicators of social norms, helping individuals, especially children, discern what is valued or disapproved within a group. Over time, such learning reinforces cultural norms, facilitates group cohesion, and supports a sense of belonging. By focusing on attitudes as the bridge between personal dispositions and collective representations, this framework reveals how emotions contribute to the transmission and stability of cultural practices. Revisiting Durkheim’s foundational insights through the lens of contemporary psychology, this talk emphasizes the importance of integrating affective and social learning processes into our understanding of how individuals come to navigate — and reproduce — their social worlds.
Children’s emotion inferences from situational and contextual cues
Tone Kristine Hermansen
Emotional understanding is a cornerstone of successful social interaction, influencing children's social skills, peer acceptance, and the quality of their relationships with others. By being able to consider both how a friend or sibling is currently feeling, as well as how they might feel if circumstances were to change, emotionally competent children can adjust their behavior and interactions accordingly during peer interactions. Historically, much of the literature on children’s emerging emotion understanding has centered on the development of children's recognition of facial expressions. However, while facial recognition is undoubtedly important, this perspective falls short in capturing the full complexity of how children understand emotions. For example, emotions are not always overtly displayed, and in many cases, children must rely on situational cues to understand how someone might feel. This talk begins by giving a brief overview of prior work showing how children: 1) infer others’ emotions from situational cues; and 2) make more reliable emotion inferences following situational as compared to facial cues. Next, new empirical research is presented to show how children also recognize that the emotional implications of situation depend on the broader temporal context of a situation. The findings from this study suggests that already from a young age, children realize that the emotional implications of a situation are not fixed, but can shift and even reverse depending on the broader context. This is not a trivial matter because it shows how even young children correctly realize that emotions can be inferred from opaque and shifting narratives — narratives that capture the way that real life unfolds over time.
Potential topics for discussion:
- Children’s emotion inferences across a greater variety of emotionally charged situations
- Children’s emotion inferences following situations triggering more complex emotions, like relief or disappointment
- The role of prior experiences on children’s emotion inferences at different ages
Why Do Children Trust Robots? Rethinking Minds, Machines, and Playful Sociality
Arvid Kappas and Rebecca Stower
Understanding when and why children trust artificial agents is a question with both theoretical and practical significance. For developmental scientists, robots and virtual agents offer unique experimental advantages: They allow greater control over behavior than human interactants, making them powerful tools for probing how children represent others. For designers and educators, the same question carries pragmatic weight—how do we build systems that children perceive as trustworthy, especially in learning contexts?
In this talk, we survey existing research and present findings suggesting that robots may not simply be treated as human stand-ins. Children might engage with them differently—not just because of how they act, but because robots are often perceived as cooler, more fun, or more interesting than people. This raises both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, these agents can be designed to maximize engagement and trust; on the other, they might not reflect the same mental models children use for human others.
We invite discussion on what this means for using robots as tools in cognitive research and as partners in educational environments. Are robots truly proxies for people—or something fundamentally different?