Can We Use Observations of Infant-Caregiver Interactions as the Basis for a Model of the Representational World?: Commentary on Paper by Beebe, Lachmann, and Jaffe

The program of work reported by Beebe, Lachmann, and Jaffe is remarkable from the point of view of both its originality and, perhaps more important, its theoretical coherence. It is a highly satisfactory aspect of this work that it raises so many exciting questions for further research. For example, is the lack of exact matching on facial-mirroring tests a predictor of infant security in the strange situation in the manner that temporal or rhythmic aspects of mother-infant or stranger-infant communication was found to be? Or, is the latency of the infant's response to the caregiver in the time-series (Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average ARIMA) models of predictive significance (was the infant who responded 1 ¹/₂ seconds after the mother's change of engagement level anxious-avoidant, anxious-resistant, or disorganized)? Can mother-infant pairs be clustered in terms of the ARIMA functions of their interactions; what are the developmental sequelae for a slowly responding infant of a rapidly reacting mother or vice versa? How does such responsivity evolve; is it the same throughout the child's development or does the mother become gradually more sensitive to the infant with development? And can we demonstrate in longitudinal studies the evolution of the schemata of interaction hypothesized by Beebe and colleagues? Is the quality of