Abstract
When adults interact with babies, they do special things. In this chapter, through a microanalysis of interaction scenes between an adult and a 7-month-old baby, we describe the infant-directed improvised performance. The aesthetic perspective assumed led us to continue the path initiated by others, evidencing remarkable structural and functional affinities between these kinds of encounters between adults and infants and the temporal arts. The infant-directed improvised performances are sound-kinetic phrases improvised by the adult through resources also used in temporal art performances, like the repetition-variation form. Adults create brief motifs collected from the baby’s behavior or contingencies in the surroundings and repeat them in varied forms. In this chapter, we specify the temporal, energetic, and spatial dimensions of these variations through the use of analytical tools developed for the exegesis of artistic expression. Interesting events occur in infant-directed improvised performance: adults summon infants to social life, offer them well-formed behavioral units favoring their recognition, and interpret the world for infants, regulating their moods. They also illuminate cognitive structures such as image schemas and invite infants to experience primary metaphors. By virtue of performances, babies are also initiated into corporeal and aesthetic enculturation.
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Notes
- 1.
From a first-person perspective in social cognition (focused on embodied simulation), mirror neurons and mirror related mechanism (a neural system matching action perception and execution of simple actions, gestures, movement, communicative mouth movement) were proposed as the neurobiological grounding for some forms of primary and secondary intersubjectivity (Ferrari & Gallese, 2007). Mirror neurons and other embodied mechanisms are considered to support the aesthetic experience in dance (Calvo-Merino, 2010), and visual arts (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007; Ferrari & Gallese, 2007). These findings endorse the idea that we are oriented or impelled to sympathetically feel certain movement qualities (or movement traces) of other people.
- 2.
For all cases of conceptual metaphors, the standardized use of capital letters in cognitive linguistics is respected.
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Español, S., Shifres, F., Martínez, I., Pérez, D. (2022). The Infant-Directed Improvised Performances: What They Are and What Happens Through Them. In: Español, S., Martínez, M., Rodríguez, F.G. (eds) Moving and Interacting in Infancy and Early Childhood. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08923-7_2
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