Yaren Gunay

PhD thesis: Development of multimodal synchrony during mother-infant interaction

Early social interactions rely on continuous, moment-to-moment adjustments between infants and their caregivers. The Mutual Regulation Model (MRM) proposes that even very young infants actively contribute to these exchanges by organizing their internal states and behaviors in ways that support engagement (Tronick, 1989). Motor activity represents one of the earliest channels through which infants participate in social coordination, yet the developmental trajectory of this motor participation—and the extent to which it differs across interaction partners—remains insufficiently understood (Scola, 2015). Investigating these early motor patterns may provide insight into how infants begin to predict, respond to, and attune to others during the first months of life.

Building on this perspective, the present thesis examines how infants and adults synchronize across multiple communicative modalities during early social interactions. Specifically, the study focuses on three interconnected communication channels: vocalizations, body movements, and gaze. The first objective is to identify early markers of interpersonal multimodal synchrony between parents and infants aged 1 to 6 months by analyzing how these modalities are temporally organized within interactions. The second objective is to investigate infants’ sensitivity to different interaction partners by comparing patterns of intra- and interpersonal synchrony in exchanges with parents versus unfamiliar adults. Through this approach, the study aims to provide a deeper understanding of how communicative synchrony develops during the first months of life and how both age and social partner shape these early interactional processes.

Publications

Capelli, E., Provenzi, L., Pili, M. P., Riva, V., Billeci, L., Cremaschi, G., … & Borgatti, R. (2026). Inter-neural co-regulation before and after an interactive perturbation in mother-infant dyads. Scientific Reports.

Nazzari, S., Pili, M. P., Günay, Y., & Provenzi, L. (2024). Pandemic babies: A systematic review of the association between maternal pandemic-related stress during pregnancy and infant development. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 162, 105723.