Universal Co-operative Motives: How Infants begin to know the Language and Culture of their Parents

In recent years, detailed examination of how normal infants respond to the adult who gives affectionate care has brought evidence for potent control behaviours in the infant that stimulate a particular diet or syllabus of supportive and instructive behaviour from caretakers (Trevarthen, 1979a, 1983; Stern, 1985; Trevarthen and Marwick, 1986). Some of the newly chartered behaviours, additional to the behaviours that make sure the infant is adequately fed and protected from harm, or healed if sick, are purely psychological in function and consequence. They ensure an increasingly elaborate mental and behavioural engagement between the infant and other persons and appear to be produced by innate self-regulatory brain systems that are, in effect, representations or primitive concepts of persons and how one has to communicate with them, verbally or non-verbally. In time, and by controlling relationships with persons who teach, they set the direction of development for cognitive processes of culture.