Therefore, social play, far from being just a playful occasion for mothers and infants to have fun together, works as a special form of triadic interaction, suited to introducing infants to learn more the domains of cultural artifacts, such as conventional norms and symbolic language (Bruner, 1975, 1982; Tomasello, 1999). In that respect,

it requires the infants to make many adjustments in order to act as full participants as they must: (1) focus on the same object as their partner, which means directing attention in a way that is different from dyadic interaction, (2) use that object together with the partner, therefore acting according to the other’s actions, and (3) say something CHIR99021 in line with their partner’s comments and thus use language in a dialogic manner. Joint attention skills by the end of the first year of life are too immature to allow infants to satisfy those requirements, as the infants’ poor performance in Bakeman and Adamson’s (1984) study clearly

showed. Indeed, to perform better, those infants should have put their joint attention skills to work in a context of shared activity and used them as a means of collaborating—rather than simply “playing”—with another person. Becoming an effective partner in collaborative interaction is, selleck inhibitor however, a gradual process. As we know from the literature on early cooperation, infants are relatively incompetent in that domain, whatever form the cooperation may take: 12-

to 18-month-olds involved in social games do not go beyond ritualized interactions (Ross & Lollis, 1987) and 14-month-old infants fail to coordinate their actions with those of another person in problem-solving tasks (Warnecken, Chen, & Tomasello, 2006; Warnecken & Tomasello, 2007). Moreover, the partner must be an adult as children can not collaborate with a peer before the age of two (e.g., Brownell & Carriger, 1990, 1991; Brownell, Ramani, & Zerwas, 2006; Eckerman, 1993; Eckerman & Peterman, 2001; Eckerman & Stein, 1990; Goldman & Ross, 1978; Hay, 1979). Recently, the emergence and early improvement of cooperative skills has been related to the development of infants’ social understanding (Brownell et al., 2006). According to the social cognitive perspective, infants approaching their first birthday recognize other people as intentional agents like themselves and therefore come to appreciate them as potential partners in collaborative interactions. Some months later, the achievement of the so-called “we intentionality” (Tomasello et al.