Openness in Infancy

Second-Person Engagement and Other Minds

This webinar was presented live on July 9, 2021. Dr. Reddy’s powerpoint presentation and the recording of her talk can be found here.

Webinar Presented by Vasudevi Reddy

Vasudevi Reddy is an Emerita Professor of Developmental and Cultural Psychology at the University of Portsmouth in the UK and was Director of its Centre for Situated Action and Communication (now Centre for Interaction, Development and Diversity). She has been interested in the origins and development of social cognition, mainly in young infants for three decades now, and has been exploring the role of emotional engagement in social understanding. She focuses on everyday, ordinary engagements in the first year of infancy (such as teasing and joking and showing-off or feeling shy) which often tend to get ignored in mainstream research. Her interest in engagement as the route to understanding has led her to questions about the nature and influence of culture on social understanding.

Her book How Infants Know Minds published by Harvard University Press argues for a second-person approach to knowing minds, a dialogical and emotion-based route to an old problem. Her current work seeks to link ideas of dialogue and connection in developmental psychology with ideas of dialogic making in the arts - particularly pottery.

In this webinar, she will be presenting a talk entitled "Openness in Infancy: Second-Person Engagement and Other Minds." She will identify some common assumptions about how other minds - people as subjects rather than 'things' - are largely hidden to infants. They certainly hinder attempts to understand social understanding in infancy. She will describe some examples of everyday phenomena - feeling shy, anticipating being picked up, clowning and teasing. The early appearance of these subtle skills in engagement show that involvement in second person relations is not only the basis for infant social understanding, but must also be so for psychologists' and clinicians and anyone who works with babies.