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Development of consciousness
Colwyn Trevarthen1 and Jonathan Delafield-Butt2
In B. Hopkins, E. Geangu, & S. Linkenauger (Eds.),
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development. 2nd Edition.
1
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Dugald
Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, Scotland, UK
2
Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Strathclyde, Lord Hope Building, St.
James' Road, Glasgow G4 0LT, Scotland UK
AUTHORS’ ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT
Trevarthen, C., & Delafield-Butt, J. T. (2017). Development of consciousness. In B.
Hopkins, E. Geangu, & S. Linkenauger (Eds.), Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child
Development. 2nd Edition. (pp. 821-835). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This authors’ manuscript may differ slightly from the final published version
available at:
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/psychology/developmentalpsychology/cambridge-encyclopedia-child-development-2ndedition?format=HB#1QF7eZgdHUE4AE6D.97
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Introduction: A natural science of awareness
Biology of human awareness, and how it acquires consciousness of a cultural world
Recent research that uses refined methods of tracing infant’s movements to
determine how they are coordinated and integrated proves they are directed in
selective ways to take in and adjust to information from the senses about the present
environment. It shows that the circumstances and objects of the infant’s actions are
evaluated by the infant as ‘good’ (attractive and rewarding or pleasurable), or ‘bad’
(frightening and avoided, or resisted). The manifestations of purposeful, expectant
and evaluated consciousness are identified as proof of Self-awareness, or
‘subjectivity’. Studies of the imitative and provocative actions of newborn infants in
response to the behaviours of other persons who give close attention to them prove
also that there is an innate Other-awareness, or ‘inter-subjectivity’, that attends to and
sympathises with expressive movements of a person (Trevarthen, 2001;
Kugiumutzakis and Trevarthen, 2015).
We take ‘awareness’ to mean the ability of an animal subject to guide
movements ‘prospectively’ to sustain a coherent Self in its world (Llinàs, 2001;
Merker, 2013). Animal movement, unlike physical motion of lifeless matter, evolved
to be self-created and self-related. Control of actions of a body in time and space, so
that the life of the actor is directed to necessities of life or avoidance of harm, is
essential for survival and development. Awareness, what is sensed and attended to,
must be evaluated and elaborated with ‘feelings’ that protect well-being of the active
self (Damasio, 2010), and these, for social cooperation in activities, are
communicated as ‘emotions’, which shape the development of relationships and
shared awareness.
In a discussion of the mind-brain problem, neuroscientist Roger Sperry (19131994) in 1952 made clear that we learn about a creature’s mind by studying the
‘output’ of their life activity in movement, not by measuring or classifying available
sensory ‘input’ and speculating how they might think about it or process it.
‘Integration of information’ is part of the process of an individual being conscious ‘in
the moment’, ready to act. It is created to assist the impulse to move in a ‘circular
reaction’ between the initiation of muscle action and sensory feedback, as described
by James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934). The initial purpose or function of awareness
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focuses on what the environment affords for adaptive action in the future as proposed
by James Gibson (1904-1979), and that is able to communicate this imagination for
movement to other individuals with the emotional expressions illustrated by Charles
Darwin (1809-1882). Input to the senses must be actively ‘perceived’, ‘taken up’ in a
selective manner, and developed with intention.
Consciousness begins as a part of imagined ‘projects’ for moving intentionally
from the present moment step by step in measured time. This term ‘project’ holds to
its original Latin sense -- as an imaginative activity, a “throwing forward of
movement for realization of a purpose”. It is not only the abstract or symbolic
representations of such intended action, in speech, writing, graphical plan or diagram,
though these conventions of communication have their practical purpose in
implementing projects. We are finding the foundations of a natural science of
conscious human agency in infancy, when intentions and feelings and their evolution
in life of an individual child are created intuitively and communicated directly to
sympathetic others, without words, to develop cooperative agency and experience.
We do not believe any formulated meaning of the word can make sense without
accepting the primary impulse to act with anticipation of the consequences.
Margaret Donaldson (1992, p. 267) calls this the ‘line mode’ of human mental
life, “concerned with events that have happened in the past or that might happen in
the future: that is, with the ‘there and then’”. This extending of interest and
expectation is alive in any activity of awareness, even scientific speculation about the
interneuronal processes that might structure a conscious experience. Experience taken
up by an act of consciousness can be retained in memory, and it is ‘remembered’ as
knowledge for future reference in real or imagined motor projects. By accepting, with
Baldwin, the primacy of ‘intentions to move’ for locating and elaborating what the
senses choose to receive, we avoid restricting ‘consciousness’ to mean only reflective,
rational and verbally mediated processing of information that has been learned and
stored in memory. Thus, we are free to observe human consciousness at its
developmental origin and in patterns of movements that manifest the awareness of an
infant (Trevarthen & Reddy in press).
Human awareness shares basic features of animation in behaviors with other
animals, including rhythmical timing and selective attention with affective appraisal.
It also exhibits unique powers for the development and use of acquired consciousness
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of the world. It is specially equipped to share knowledge with other human beings in a
community in order to develop traditional ways to sustain understanding of artificial
cultural beliefs and practices, which receive elaborate definition and authority in
language. Infant behavior, though it lacks such knowledge of this world and its
representation in language, shows intelligent adaptations for learning and valuing
meanings with other persons from the start of life in a family (Brazelton, in Bullowa,
1979, pp. 79-88). It is adapted for mastery of the special forms of semiosis, signalling
in body movement for conversation about ideas with companions (Trevarthen, 2015).
Studying infants’ awareness, and the development of meaning in common sense
A key discovery has been that infants, besides promoting and regulating conscious
actions of their subjective Self, are also, from birth and before, sensitive to and
capable of engaging with the manifestations of consciousness with feelings in the
movements of other human beings (Trevarthen, in Bullowa, 1979, pp. 321-347). We
describe the earliest manifestations of this ‘inter-subjectivity’ in shared time and
space, and how it develops in collaboration with sympathetic awareness of
companions, first with the child’s mother, but quickly becoming receptive to
sympathetic attentions of other intimate acquaintances. In affectionate attachments
with partners of all ages, conscious activities are shared and grow.
Finding answers by avoiding disbelief
A new beginning for a science of human nature and its intelligence
A child psychobiology that attends to natural patterns of movement for evidence of
their guidance by selective prospective awareness of present circumstances and
events, rather than to abstract rational explanations of conscious behavior for
individual thinkers, accepts that the newborn infant is a conscious person, a being able
to act with intentions that coordinate the parts of a complex body with many senses,
and who possesses emotions for guiding a life of learning and development in
dynamic human ways (Stern, 2010; Trevarthen & Reddy,in press). Special abilities
attract and guide carers who not only support and protect essential life needs, but who
find joy in play with the meaning and feelings of the infant’s actions and humors,
their ability to ‘know minds’ (Reddy, 2008). They develop co-consciousness in
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sympathetic companionship. The child is, from the start, an active collaborator in this
process of teaching and learning, a person seeking ‘common sense’ in life by
acquiring efficient practices in engagements both with objects, and with other persons
as animated beings who need to share awareness (Fig. 1).
Figure 1. The embodied human self. Functions of an embodied human self that develop
awareness of the different affordancesof physical objects and of other persons for an active
life, which is regulated by affective consciousness of proprioceptive and visceral feelings
within the body, and extended to awareness of the outside world by exteroceptive
recognitions and evaluations. Awareness of objects and awareness of people are elaborated
together in the development of cooperative understanding in a child’s mind to promote the
transmission of cultural knowledge with the support of sympathetic teachers, and this
collaborative awareness is greatly elaborated through adult life with the aid of symbolic
communica- tion and science. At every stage, the agreed understanding is eval- uated by
aesthetic and moral emotions, which become formulated in conventions of art and religion.
Repeatedly, the psychology of childhood, and the science of education for all ages,
have had to revise their assumptions and practices by recognizing that they are
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inclined to neglect the child’s initiative in doing, knowing and sharing of actionswith-awareness. We may cite the history of educational reformers recounted by
Robert Herbert Quick (1831-1891) in 1890. As Quick showed, Rabelais, Comenius,
Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel and their like have all, with their successors Alfred
North Whitehead (1861-1947) and John Dewey (1859-1952), celebrated the child’s
curiosity, sociability and ‘zest for learning’. The importance of mastery by the infant
of the complex human body in its movements was demonstrated in the 1940s by
Myrtle MacGraw (1899-1988), a follower of Dewey’s belief in the child’s animation
of his or her education by impulses for activity.
In this entry, we draw on contributions from brain science that confirm the
existence of basic motor functions of embodied awareness in individuals, and of
inter-subjective consciousness in their collaborations. More detailed
neuroembryology of perception, the generation of motives for movements in space
and time with ‘affective consciousness’, and how consciousness may be distributed,
activated and integrated in brain circuits as they grow and mature in mastery of the
motor and sensory organs of the body, are available elsewhere (Panksepp &
Trevarthen, in Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009, pp. 105-146; Trevarthen et al., 2006;
Trevarthen & Panksepp, in press). A valuable commentary for understanding of
individual volition and its awareness is provided by the philosopher Barbara
Goodrich, who insists that brain science must confront the facts of phenomenal
awareness in the rhythm of life activity. It cannot be just “… self-reflective, passive,
and timeless” (Goodrich, 2010, p. 331), as the theory of contemporary cognitive
neuroscience tends to be. She cites the exceptional contributions of neuroscientists
Rodolfo Llinás and György Buzsáki who have attended to the processes of the whole
brain that give rhythmical coherence to actions of the Self, and their attention to
sensory experience. In line with this train of thought, consider the following:
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Eminent scientists have opposed the repeated reduction of brain function
to hypothetical cognitive or input processes in mechanisms for perception
and learning. By studying the anatomy and physiology of nerve tissues
and their growth, they have established that the brain is shaped primarily
for its output in body movement (Charles Sherrington; Nikolai Bernstein;
Roger Sperry; Antonio Damasio). Research is making it ever clearer that
our fundamental emotional structures engender dynamic patterned actions
as well as motivation and feelings (Panksepp & Biven, 2012). The
function of the brain is to make the body engage the environment by
moving its muscles in coherent ways with refined economy of the
physical and chemical energies required to sustain mental balance. Good
living moves harmoniously with wonderful efficiency and with playful
good humour. Illness and distress cause weak or impulsive actions that
meet the environment erratically and cause inner pathologies and conflict
in communication. (Trevarthen & Panksepp, 2016).
Infant consciousness exhibits core components of the vital intelligence of adult
consciousness. Infants and their parents share a human body with the same basic
measures of vitality in the prospective time of movement (Stern, 2010; Trevarthen,
2016). They express and engage one another with the same emotions (Trevarthen,
2009). The growing brain and body of the child will animate years of learning with a
curiosity and affective consciousness that anticipates a knowledge of the world and its
cultural interpretation. Even before birth, a baby can find fellowship in synchrony and
sympathy with expressions of fully developed adult consciousness, provided that
expressions of this more experienced awareness are modulated to enhance
correspondence of motives and feelings between them, as in case of ‘baby talk’ with
its conspicuous ‘musicality’ (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009).
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Awareness of a newborn is the product of a fetal intentional awareness recently
brought to light
The Royal College of Gynaecologists and Obstetricians, who have legal authority
over the quality of medical care of young babies, published new guidelines in 2010
establishing that the fetus at 24 weeks gestation is a sensitive human being due the
same standard of medical care as an adult, including analgesics to reduce pain. There
is now evidence that human emotions of pleasure and pain are expressed by the fetus
by gestures of the hands and expressions of the face (Reissland & Kisilevsky, 2015).
At 22 weeks gestational age, hand movements directed to touch the fetus’s own
mouth or eye, or to touch the uterine wall, have coherent self-related intentional form,
timing and sensitivity (Zoia, Blason, D'Ottavio, et al., 2007; Delafield-Butt &
Gangopadhyay, 2013). In the period between 14 and 22 weeks gestational age, there
is development of sensitivity to distinguish the body of the self from the body of a
twin other, and, as the psychiatrist Alessandra Piontelli (1992) has shown, twin
fetuses display differences of temperament, which persist through childhood.
Western philosophy, trained to use sophisticated rational ways of explaining
conscious actions and their recollection in thoughtful debate and text, has long
struggled with the notion of a primal awareness of movement regulated by an
integrated self-consciousness. This tradition has led to the theory that consciousness is
‘constructed’ in infancy by learning how to integrate supposedly mindless reflex
sensory-motor responses in intelligent projects, and development of a ‘theory of
mind’.
In recent decades, a child psychology that accepts Darwin’s theory of evolution
by natural selection of adaptive use of experience, has found a different origin for
human consciousness. Primary features of control and evaluation are active in an
infant’s movements from birth, and they have temporal features and affective
modulations matching those intuitively governing activities and communication of an
affectionate parent. Comparison with other species, including apes, throws light on
the special adaptations of social signalling in infants and parents for motivating
development of human cultural awareness mediated by symbols (Llinàs, 2001).
What is consciousness? How are we conscious?
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There are important distinctions to be made in how we use language. Does
consciousness mean ‘Acting with knowledge’, the HOW, or is it just the object,
‘WHAT we are knowing’? Is it observable in behavior of other individuals just like
any other environmental event, or must it take into account inarticulate feelings that
affect what they and we attend to with a living volition? Reflective or discursive
consciousness is what philosophers argue about, and many are persuaded that animals
and newborn infants are unconscious beings, but new resurgence of interest in the
phenomenological tradition of ‘Continenatal philosophy’ of the 19th and 20th centuries
recognizes the foundation of consciousness as pre-reflective, pre-conceptual, and
grounded in the rhythms of a body acting with a sensorimotor intentionality
(Delafield-Butt & Gangopadhyay, 2013). Jaak Panksepp, a leader in research on the
emotions of animals, shows that neuroscience, too, has been distracted by selected
facts of neural activity, which are assumed to exhibit, and depend upon, ‘processing’
of sensory information (Panksepp & Biven, 2012).
Accounts of the experience of creative consciousness include reference
to aggregations of actions and feelings that constitute it through the time of intentional
activity. That is what Mozart described, in a famous letter, about how music came to
him as a gifted young practitioner of the performance and invention of the art.
If consciousness is an act of living discovery, of experience created by a whole
person as an agent with alert body and mind, intentions, sensations and feelings, it
must be explained by consideration of the nature of the human organism’s life story.
It involves how the mind comes to be, what its motivations and feelings are from the
beginning, and how it is sustained.
Finally, to understand the transmission of human knowledge, we have to
consider how the impulses of consciousness are shared in a community. A vivid part
of our life is an immediate awareness of the presence of other persons with
appreciation of their self-related attitudes and expressions. We enter the will and
feelings of other persons simply by perceiving the expectations and evaluations of
what they are doing with their movements from infancy (Kugiumutzakis &
Trevarthen, 2015; Reddy, 2008).
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Knowing with purpose and feeling, and its sharing in company
Consciousness without feelings cannot survive
An animal’s consciousness is organized with reference to the form of its body and
potential movements, which direct sensory organs in selective perception of the
environment that constitutes that species’ Umwelt or ‘life world’ of the biologist
Jakob von Uexküll (1854-1944). The experience of all of its many parts must become
an ‘imaginative project’ of the self-as-agent integrated by the central nervous system.
Furthermore, the conscious experience of a single self-as-agent who is about to act
requires the attribution of vital, affective value or ‘feelings’ to every object it is
interested in (Damásio, 2010). This ‘affective appraisal’, as Sherrington had called it,
gives special importance to every decision or event that is experienced by the Self .
The appreciation of the ‘affordances’ of material objects or social partners,
what can be done with them by the actions of the coordinated self, is mediated by
ancient midline networks of the brain stem and midbrain, which are highly conserved
across vertebrate species (Merker, 2013). Core affective consciousness carries a deep
phylogenetic history, which our conscious experience shares with that of other species
(Panksepp & Biven, 2012). These integrative mechanisms of the physiology of body
and brain, and their adaptation for communication in movements of cooperative social
life are much elaborated in human beings and animated in all forms of music
(Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009). They mediate our mental health, and its celebration in
the arts.
Feelings generated within sub-cortical structures that integrate action-withawareness of the whole body with its separately mobile parts, not only evaluate the
sensations appreciated by the body in the present moment for immediate benefit or
protection, they build experience of agency through time to create episodes in life
stories of the Self (Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, 2013). Projects of purposeful,
ordered movements, planned to accommodate their future effects, are first evident in
proprioceptive regulation of movement patterns of the fetus, which test body
awareness (Delafield-Butt & Gangopadhyay, 2013). After birth, with discovery of
‘distance senses’, especially vision, intentional movements direct infant
consciousness in more adventurous ways, assimilating perceptions of the world
outside the body (Delafield-Butt & Trevarthen, 2015). This is the growth of what
Margaret Donaldson calls ‘human sense’, beyond the infant’s ‘point’ mode of mind,
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with a ‘locus of concern’, in the ‘here and now’. With increasing scope of imagination
and memory, new powers of body movement and more discriminating perception of
features in the world, a ‘line’ mode comes to life that casts the awareness of
significant past into the possible future. This mode predicts what will happen when
the mind conceives of doing something, ‘anytime and anyplace’. According to
Donaldson:
The devising of novel purposes comes readily to us because we have brains
that are good at thinking of possible future states - at considering not merely
what is but what might be. We exist in a world of 'hard fact', but we can
imagine it as changed; and from a very early age we know that, within certain
limits, we are able to change it. It matters very much to us to find out how
these limits are set, an activity closely related to the general purpose of
understanding what the world is like. In this context 'the world' includes other
people as a most important component. And, if we have any wisdom, it also
includes ourselves (Donaldson, 1992, p. 9).
With maturity awareness of phenomena and their meanings becomes abstract or
‘transcendent’, out of space and time’, and Donaldson distinguishes this selfgenerated kind of understanding as ‘intellectual’, as in science and mathematics, and
‘value sensing’, as in arts and religion. In old age, as powers of action weaken and
ambitions decline, we again attend more to inner processes of thinking and feeling, as
we did in infancy.
Consciousness without emotions cannot communicate
As Darwin discovered, emotional expressions serve as agents of selection for survival
in the evolution and development of all animals, from bacteria or insects, to
octopuses, fish, birds and mammals (Packard & Delafield-Butt, 2014). Emotions
evaluate what the world has to offer in relation to the needs of the self for sustenance,
play, courtship, and safety. Infant consciousness is richly expressive of emotions with
intentions, and it communicates with these affective states of mind as they regulate
awareness in other persons.
Adult feelings are powerfully affected by sensitivity for a baby’s smiles and
coos or grimaces and cries. Babies, for their part, require immediate reciprocal
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engagement with an adult’s emotions to maintain their health, self-confidence and
good humor in being. For example, in an experiment where the mother is asked to
cease movement during the flow of a happy proto-conversation with her baby, the
infant quickly becomes distressed and avoidant. The same happens if a portion of the
mother’s part in a live chat with her baby mediated by double television is replayed to
the baby (Fig. 2) The insensitive replay betrays the baby’s expectations and
immediately causes him or her to become unhappy, distracted and avoidant
(Trevarthen, 2009).
Figure 2: Double Television communication with a two moth old, and the disturbing effect of
replay. (Murray and Trevarthen, 1985)
Social connection in shared consciousness can be evident within minutes of birth. It is
appreciated, with reciprocal imitation, by a multimodal awareness of movements of
the head, face, hands and voice that communicate feelings with intention
(Kugiumutzakis & Trevarthen, 2015).
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Sensori-motor regulation of awareness of the self in three domains of vitality
Sherrington (1906) defined three systems of the central nervous system (CNS) that
take up and integrate sensory information of an animal agent. These are subjected to
selective control by muscles that move the associated sense organs.
First is the visceroceptive ‘world’ within the body, regulated by the autonomic
nervous system. Heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation, metabolic activity,
digestion, water retention, together contribute to maintain the physiological state and
the search for vital needs of the individual, both in the present moment, and in
preparation for future well-being.
Second, the proprioceptive system, including the stretch receptors, muscles
spindles and the vestibular organs that detect physical effects caused by displacements
of the body and its parts, measures forces inside the body-in-action as it regulates
posture and gesture the gravitational field.
Third, detection of opportunities for action with awareness beyond the body is
mediated by exteroceptive senses of touch, hearing, olfaction and vision. These
confirm the location and displacement of the body in relation to the world by ‘exproprioception’, and identify objects and organisms, by the ‘distance receptors’ of
sight, hearing, and smell, and by the proximal receptors of taste and touch.
Information about the whole integrated life-world of the Self is conceived from
these three axes or windows of awareness to form a detailed account of the body as it
moves through space and time, together with appreciation of resources vital for its
needs for sustenance and safety, or the advantages and risks of social engagements
with other selves (Fig. 1)
Making of primary embodied consciousness before birth
Intrinsic motives for an aware life from the first movements
After ‘autopoesis’ or self-making of the embryo body shaped for purposeful forward
directed motor activities, and mapping of this body form in the ectoderm tissue of a
primordial CNS, the inter-cellular systems for regulating awareness with emotion
become integrated during the first month of gestation, fashioning an ‘intrinsic motive
formation’ (IMF) which is elaborated in later stages (Trevarthen, 2001). This
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foundation for conscious activity shows functional mapping among groups of cells in
the CNS before its network is electrically active, and before neurons of the cerebral
cortex are generated in the forebrain.
The IMF comprises a chain of special visceral motor nuclei of the hind brain
that are formed primitively to activate autonomic functions, and that become specially
adapted in the human fetus for future participation in ‘conversations of feeling’, by
head and eye movements, face expressions, vocalizations and gestures. By the end of
the second month, the beginning of the fetal period, the main components of the brain
are in place and the special sense organs of the head, face and hands are being given
their dedicated form for sight, hearing, vestibular sense, olfaction and touch, as well
as for their participation in intimate communication (Fig. 3). All are impressed with a
‘somatotopic code’, which coordinates their connections after axons grow to link the
different areas.
Figure 3. Left: How the sensorimotor organs of the 8-week human fetus are formed in
readiness for communication of states of consciousness. Right: the rhythm of behaviors in
proto-conversation with a 2-month-old child. (Trevarthen & Reddy, 2007).
Beginnings of human sense in the sub-cortical brain
The neuroscientists Jaak Panksepp and Bjorn Merker explain conscious experience as
the product of an ecological system of the animal active in its environment, with
awareness regulated by affective evaluation within the upper brain stem (Merker,
2013; Panksepp & Biven, 2012;). Anencephalic or hydranencephalic children, who do
not possess cerebral cortices but have intact brain stems, can live for some time
postnatally, orienting attention to events outside them, showing emotions of pleasure
and distress in social encounters generated in ‘core affective systems’. Although their
cognitive capacities are greatly reduced, these children are manifestly conscious, have
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feelings, and shape their actions with intention. Following development of the
foundations of these mental functions in the early fetus, a human infant is prepared for
cultural or collaborative learning in affectionate relationships from birth.
The appearance of a conscious rhythm of intentions
First movements made spontaneously by a human fetus at 2 months have controlled
timing and sequencing. They are neither random nor reflex responses. They are
‘intentional’ or ‘aware’, showing anticipation of sensory confirmation for various
self-related effects (Delafield-Butt & Gangopadhyay, 2013). Ultrasound recordings of
the spontaneous movements of an undisturbed, second trimester fetus within the
uterus show the hands making careful exploration of the body, head and face, and
expressions by the face of delight or disgust in discriminating response to substances
encountered in the mother’s body. These movements occur before the cerebral
hemispheres are functioning, and are clearly adapted for the intimate communication
of states of consciousness with feeling. Researchers have also found that the touching
movements fetuses direct to their own body are different in their dynamics from those
reaching out to touch the body of a twin. The latter gesture is slower or more
‘careful’, demonstrating a respectful sensitivity for the other self, or ‘social
awareness’. There is an intimate transmission of states of vitality in movement
between mother and fetus. Nadja Reissland has found that after 20 weeks, fetuses may
make gestures of self-touching with the left hand that appear to signal emotional
attitudes in sympathy with a mother’s feelings of stress. They show positive response,
such as smiling, to her voice, and they may shape mouth movements of articulation
when hearing a person speaking. They also show distress when subjected to
intoxication by a mother’s smoking (Reissland & Kisilevsky, 2015).
The new findings in fetal psychology confirm that the core structure of
consciousness with feelings is active before the neocortex is functional and before
postnatal experience of the world, and that it has features that remain invariant
throughout cognitive development. It grows from a primary, brain stem mediated
consciousness, with intentional action, perceptual awareness and affective appraisal,
and the expressive prosody and syntax of its movements are adapted to gain a
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reflective, conceptually backed abstract consciousness that can be represented in the
semantics of language. Human socially negotiated or cultural consciousness,
developing symbolic communication of conventional ideas, rituals, and techniques,
depends on the organs for communication of impulses of consciousness, by
movements of facial expression, gesture and vocalization, with their associate
capacities for sensory confirmation and perceptual discrimination. These organs
develop their functions from the last trimester of prenatal life.
How the motives and feelings are transferred between the embodied minds
remains a mystery for a psychology that does not have sufficient information about
the motive states that ‘programme’ integrated body movements through time. The
consequence is that they may construct intentional projects and give narratives about
them (Bruner, 1990; Delafield-Butt & Trevarthen, 2015).
Figure 4. A two-month preterm baby communicates with her father in an ICU in Amsterdam.
With her eyes closed, Naseera smiles in response to her father’s touches, carries out a wellphrased ‘conversa- tion’ with him by alternating simple ‘coo’ sounds (N, Naseera; F, father).
Top right: after their dialogue is finished and her father is adjusting his clothes and looking
down at her, she makes a gesture with her free left hand, pointing her index finger and thumb
as if reflecting on what they ‘discussed’.
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Readiness for shared primary consciousness
In response to the last question concerning the origin of human interpersonal affective
and intentional consciousness and how it develops in the fetus anticipating dialogue,
we present an account of the actions-with-awareness-and-emotions of a two-month
preterm newborn, around 32 weeks gestational age, in intimate communication with
her father. A sensitive exchange of short vocalizations between the baby and the
father, who was holding his daughter under his clothes against his chest, reveals that
they shared the same sense of time for alternation of syllables and phrases in a
conversation without words.
Naseera was born 3 months preterm in an Intensive Care Unit where intimate
body-to-body contact by ‘kangarooing’ was being used by the pediatrician Richard de
Leeuw to help the physical and mental development of very preterm babies, and to
support and encourage the confidence of their parents. Her mother began attending to
Naseera, but soon had to be taken from her to have a surgical operation. Her father
took over the kangarooing, and with pleasure and pride accepted Naseera to his body
under his clothes every day, cradling her against his skin and responding to her
movements and expressions with gentle touching and speech.
The development of their intimate relationship, and Naseera’s excellent
progress with her father’s sensitive care was documented by videos made by a clinical
psychologist Saskia van Rees. Figure 4 shows her vocal responses to imitations of her
father at two months before term, one month after her birth.
Transformation of awareness after birth
Neonatal imitative dialogues and development of proto-conversation as narratives of
life in relations
Full-term newborn infants show immediate awareness of objects outside their body,
and they can imitate deliberate movements of head, eyes, face, voice and hands, and
repeat them to sustain a dialogue, displaying a social consciousness with emotional
sensibility that is very appealing for a parent (Trevarthen & Reddy,in press). The
dynamical properties of Naseera’s movements, reveal a sense of time and feelings of
affection that correspond with adult actions and feelings (Trevarthen, 2016). They
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have narrative form revealing that the vitality of experience passes through measured
phases (Delafield-Butt & Trevarthen, 2015). How?
Within a few weeks, this ‘thinking in movement’ can excite a parent to
appreciate and share the infant’s ‘story’ with astonished pleasure, in ‘protoconversation’ (Bateson, in Bullowa, 1979, pp. 63-77; see Fig. 5). Thus begins intuitive
support for the life of the primate Homo sapiens, sharing a unique, speciescharacteristic, capacity for the ‘make believe’ of cultural consciousness, which will
lead to symbolic play, speech and language, and a heritage of rituals, artistic
productions, beliefs, built environments, and science.
Table 1 – Age-related stages in development of ‘actions-with-awareness’,
and of communication of impulses and feelings, in infants and young toddlers.
AGE
DEVELOPMENT OF NEW LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Months 1-2
Primary intersubjectivity: Direct sensitivity to the expressions of
feeling in intimate contact with an Other. ‘Dialogic closure’ in protoconversation sustained by two-way transmission of emotions.
Identification of familiar affectionate partners.
Months 3-6
Games I: Exploration of surroundings and manipulation of objects.
Pleasure in body-action and in object manipulation is shared, and imitated,
in play, including musical-poetic play. Laughter, mirror self-awareness
and ‘showing off; as a ‘social Me’ appear.
Months 6-9
Games II: Lively socio-dramatic play and self-confident presentation
with family increase, as does fear of strangers. The first ritualized ‘protosigns’ are learned in play. First ‘emotional referencing’ and joint
orientation to a locus of interest aided by pointing.
Months 9-18
Secondary intersubjectivity: Shared interest in tasks and the uses of
objects; infant produces ‘protolanguage’. Learning of the conventional
meanings of things. Use of objects that others have given value
‘recreatively’, in fantasy play.
19
Figure 5. A proto-conversation between a 6-week-old baby girl and her mother. The acoustic
analysis was made by musician Stephen Malloch of the ‘musicality’ of their narrative in
sound, portrayed as a pitch plot. The vocal expressions of the infant (boxed) mark the
transition between introduction and development, the climax, and the resolution. The mother
ends with a coda, reflecting on what they have ‘said.’ Modified after Malloch and Trevarthen
(2009, p. 5).
Development of cultural consciousness before speech: Secondary consciousness
The human consciousness beginning in the mid-term fetus undergoes age-related
transformations through the whole life of that person. Learning is subject to
developments in motives that change the life of the body and the functions of the
brain. Changes are particularly rapid and transformative in infancy and early
childhood as first cultural habits are mastered. Key stages in the first 18 months after
birth are summarized in Table 1 (Trevarthen, 2015).
20
The first two months may be seen as a maturation of adaptations for simple acts
that orient actions directed to detect features of the immediately present outside
world, and for a primary engagement with purposes and feelings of a caregiving adult.
In the third and fourth months, both these forms of consciousness are transformed. As
binocular vision matures and the support of the head and reaching of the arms become
stronger, the baby shows more discriminating awareness of objects distant from the
body. Attention to the mother for intimate face-to-face communication is reduced as
the baby becomes more playful and provocative (Reddy, 2008; see Fig. 6). This
incites an affectionate parent to present teasing games and ritualized performances in
the form of nursery rhymes and body-action games. The infant finds these very
attractive and learns the conventions quickly (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009). The
growth of consciousness is led by selective attention to support curiosity in directing
of movements and learning of skills.
21
Figure 6. After 3 months, infants’ bodies become stronger and their second-person
consciousness is more complex. (a) Coyness, a sharing of awkwardness or uncertainty in
engagement with a mirror other who acts immediately as oneself. An 11-week-old shows a
classic ‘coy’ reaction when her mother holds her up to a mirror (Reddy, 2008). Reproduced
with permission of Vasudevi Reddy. (b) A 4-month-old infant is curious about the room and
con- centrates her attention on an object presented by her mother. (c) When her mother starts
a rhythmic body game, the baby is both intensely interested and pleased. At 4 months she is
attentive and participates in a ‘ritual’ action game, “Round and round the gar- den,”
composed as a rhyming four-line stanza with a lively iambic pulse. The infant has learned the
song and vocalizes at the end in synchrony with the mother and matching her pitch. (d) A 6month- old sitting on her father’s knee smiles with pride as she responds to her mother’s
request to show “Clappa-clappa-handies.” (e) The same 6-month-old shows her uneasiness
and withdrawal in front of two strangers, a man and a woman, who attempt to communicate
in friendly but unfamiliar ways. The infant appears to experience shame as well as distress.
22
‘Play’ is identified as one of the principle emotional systems of the brain stem
system, showing deep evolutionary roots across the vertebrates (Panksepp & Biven,
2012). Studies of play in infants and children demonstrate its importance for learning
and development of conscious knowledge, animating a space to master intentions
enacted through movements, and to learn the joy of success and to remember the
frustration of failure. Made with others, play becomes an important mediator for
social understanding, enabling the intentions to be shared and learned, affiliative
bonding, and social understanding within a community (Reddy, 2008). Playful
impulses of imagination in moving motivate high achievements in art and science.
Einstein confirmed that enjoyable imagination of body movements inspired his
mathematical invention.
Meaningful cooperative communication before talk: Performing a personality
By the end of the first year, self-consciously performed and shared games with
marked ‘second person awareness’ (Reddy, 2008) lead to cooperative activities that
involve sharing intentions for the use of objects as tools for tasks, such as eating food,
carrying small objects in containers, or using furniture or transportation devices to
support the body.
Two-month-olds, when they are lying flat on their back on a pad that records
their body movements, are found to change the tonus of their body in preparation for
being lifted when a parent leans over them to pick them up. This shows a readiness
for sharing intentions (Trevarthen & Reddy, 2016, in press). One-year-old infants
cooperate in giving and taking objects and follow pointing gestures (see Fig. 7). They
are extending their awareness of other’s intentions to include their selective attentions
and instrumental actions.
23
Figure 7. Basilie at one year, showing off, and cooperating with purpose, using conventional
objects in meaningful ways (putting wooden dolls in a truck, following her mother’s request),
demonstrating her mastery of ‘secondary intersubjectivity’ or cooperative awareness, before
language.
As was observed by Henri Wallon (1879-1962) in the 1940s, a young child’s
self-awareness accompanies an awareness of being appreciated by others This leads to
displays of what he called posturing or ‘préstance’. Imitation and pretence build a
strong sense of social self to be shared with companions of any age in imaginative
games and stories.
Consciousness growing after learning to walk and talk
By the middle of the second year, the period of infancy ends when non-verbal ‘protolanguage’ becomes language (Halliday, in Bullowa, 1979, pp. 171-190). Most
children at this age are comprehending words that others use to name objects and
actions that are shared intimately. Imaginative play with increasing curiosity for
others’ intentions leads to cultural learning in the full sense, and it involves strong
feelings of self-conscious pride and fear of shame (Reddy, 2008; Trevarthen, 2009).
The child is beginning to walk, which greatly expands their world they can apprehend
and the range of acts of communication. Two-year-olds, while becoming much more
24
aware of the manners and interests of their family, are famously wilful and
determined to regulate their own experience. Their expanding abilities allow them to
share play with peers and other children, exploring inventions of a bigger makebelieve world (Bruner, 1990; Donaldson, 1992).
Motivation for human consciousness: A summary of the developmental process
From the start, human consciousness is adapted for a lifetime of learning in
companionship
In all stages of the development of a child’s intelligence, from the subtle awareness
manifest in infancy to the self-confidence of the toddler in the community and
development of fluency in language, invariant principles of self-generated intentional
movement are shared. These show sympathetic imagination and affective evaluation
to motivate learning in companionship (Delafield-Butt & Trevarthen, 2015). The
impulses of the child need response, and can be formalized to guide educational
practice. With others’ help, the learner builds a purposeful sense of the future that
enhances the vitality of the individual, and the life of the family and community.
Conscious awareness expands and refines its aesthetic and moral feelings with
abstract thoughts and plans that can imagine objects and events outside the present
moment, and in conventional ways.
Jerome Bruner, in the 1960s, described progress of the child’s initiatives in
consciousness from enactive or action-based, to iconic, image-based, and then to
language-based symbolic representation. This series compares with Donaldson’s
account of the child’s growing ‘locus of concern’, from the infant’s point mode of
immediate experience in action, to the line mode of cognition through time and in
different circumstances, and then to construct and transcendent modes of
representation (Donaldson, 1992). It also recalls the description by the philosopher
Whitehead of a child’s development and learning passing through phases of romance,
discipline and generalization. It is clear these leaders in the humanist theory of
education, while agreeing that the child has creative initiative from the start, place
differing emphasis on the intentional and emotional aspects of the child’s endeavor.
All accept, with Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896-1934), that a curiosity about
meanings to be shared is in the nature of the child, and is essential for the cultivation
25
of cultural intelligence. In his consideration of the psychosocial development feelings
of a child with experience of life in the family and community, the developmental
psychologist Erik Erikson (1902-1994) adapted psychoanalytical theory to explain
normal creative development of the feelings of the child’s person in emotional
relations, and emotional responses to unsympathetic support. He described these four
phases from infancy to maturity: trust vs mistrust, autonomy vs shame and doubt,
initiative vs guilt, and industry vs inferiority.
Following discoveries concerning the foundations of affective values for
intentional action that develop in the sub-cortical parts of the mammalian brain before
birth (Merker, 2013; Panksepp & Biven, 2012), and reflecting on the more sensitive
interpretations of how the child participates in and contributes to aesthetic and moral
evaluations of human collaboration in life, we identify three early phases in formation
of cultural awareness in the mind (see Fig. 8). These map foundations for a lifetime
of consciousness and its stories, as follows:
Primary consciousness develops in embryogenesis and is first operative
in early fetal life, mediated with the appearance of the brain stem
Intrinsic Motive Formation (IMF) (Trevarthen, 2001). Core regulatory
mechanisms, the peri-aqueductal grey of the midbrain, the hypothalamus,
reticular formation, basal ganglia and limbic system, are laid down in the
first trimester. They organize sensory regulation of movements of the
body and limbs of the fetus in patterns that gain affective evaluation and
sensitivity for sounds and rhythms of other human presence. Purposeful
action, rudimentary learning and memory are evident, but the cognitive
systems of the cerebral cortex do not appear until the second trimester.
They develop massively after birth.
Fetal cognition is embodied and enactive, regulated by sensations
generated in the moving body, and by sensory contingences of contacts
with the immediate, tangible environment. Emotions that will regulate
communication in later life are portrayed in face expressions and
gestures. Primary consciousness becomes evident in purposeful
movement of the foetus at the end of the first trimester, is active at birth,
and remains across a lifetime, gaining additional powers of memory and
imagination.
26
Secondary consciousness begins with development of limbic function of
the forebrain in the last trimester of fetal life and in early infancy. It
enables a fetus to develop coordination of intentional actions that intend
to reach goals outside the body. After birth, it is ready to animate plans
for serial ordering of actions allowing them to be imagined beyond the
present moment. Intrinsic rhythms and intensities of neural activity
regulating the dynamics of movement engage with matching impulses of
a parent’s affectionate expressions in proto-conversational dialogues of
‘primary intersubjectivity’ (Table 1, months 1 and 2). These abilities are
active before visual awareness and interest in the environment more
distant from the body undergo rapid development in the middle of the
first year of postnatal life (Table 1, months 3 to 9). The fundamental
mechanisms for vocal expression of emotion, and those for articulation
of speech that develop later in the cerebral neocortex, are organized
around mid-gestation in nuclei of the brain stem, with the basal ganglia,
thalamus and limbic cortex. Multimodal afference for brain stem
circuits would seem to be crucial to communication with neonates and
for their first imitations, which develop into well-controlled protoconversational abilities by 6 weeks. An enactive and embodied cognition
modulates the primary intentions to begin learning about the outside
world, and to share experiences playfully. A store of memories of
events begins to extend awareness of possible futures, which are
discovered in the present moment in the rhythmic harmony of movement
in the body, and communicated with other persons in the shared
narrative forms of affect and intention of ‘communicative musicality’.
27
Tertiary consciousness develops through later infancy and early
childhood as new neocortical functions bring a more discriminating
awareness and more extensive imagination to direct growing motor
skills. Learning abstract, reflective, conceptually-backed plans enables
intentions-to-act to be retained for hours, days, or more. This 'off-line'
reasoning, with added thalamo-cortical systems of awareness, continues
to rely upon the initiatives and affective evaluations of limbic and brain
stem systems, and is structured in space and time by their body-related
vitality dynamics. In the second year, development of the cooperative
awareness of ‘secondary intersubjectivity’ marks the beginning of a
personal and technical education for mastery of manners and skills of
cultural life in a community beyond the family, but is dependent upon
the impulses and feelings active in earlier stages (Trevarthen, 2001).
Figure 8. Transformations of human consciousness. The transformations of human
consciousness, through primary (1), secondary (2), and tertiary (3) stages, are adapted for
future mastery of cultural and technical practices and beliefs in intimate interpersonal
awareness and imaginative analysis of projects in movement. The successive domains from
fetus to early childhood of purposeful action-with-awareness and communication are
achieved by extending, not replacing, those that developed earlier. They mature in the
articulate and rationally validated awareness of adult life, which is recorded through the
generations in symbolic representations.
!
28
!!
Developments in the meso-limbic cortices of the temporal and frontal
lobes in infants and toddlers transform autonomic self-regulation, the
expressions of emotions in communication, and the motives for action
and experience. At all stages, these later maturing limbic and
neocortical circuits, with growth of the cerebellum, emerge in reciprocal,
dynamic and increasing involvement with the multi-modal core
regulatory systems of the IMF that were formed in utero.
Maturation of tertiary consciousness for future learning
As the toddler grows new powers of rapid movement, especially of the hands
and vocal organs, timed and sequenced with increasing precision by the Selfsensing cerebellum, culture shapes consciousness with symbolic
communication of meanings in language. The capacity of neocortical and
limbic systems is expanded to learn and retain knowledge of specific objects,
events, and concepts, and to evaluate them with recognized aesthetic and
moral feelings. Through ritualized instruction or teaching, this growth is
‘cultivated’ and the values and procedures of a community learned according
to a planned curriculum. But natural expansion of knowledge with affective
and perceptual discrimination, reflection and reasoning, depends on active
emotional engagement of the will of the child with social others, in
affectionate and playful cooperation.
Conclusions
Human Self-awareness is generated within an active and perceptive body from early
fetal stages, and develops after birth in experience with affective appraisal and in
intimate communication of purposeful experience with familiar companions. The
special powers of cultural consciousness that grow from infancy can be understood in
light of new information on life functions that develop before birth. This constitutes
an organic theory of consciousness, evolved to develop intersubjective intelligence
that communicates awareness of cultural meanings.
Consciousness as ‘acting with knowledge’ requires a nervous system that
29
regulates prospective perception in intentional engagement with the world. The neural
systems that integrate internal sensory information for the whole body develop in the
embryo during the first eight weeks of gestation. They integrate sensory information
in coordination with the impulses of a motor system and are capable of selecting and
structuring perceptual experience in the time of self-generated, goal-directed action.
By fourteen weeks, the fetus demonstrates prospective awareness and intentional
motor control of a ‘primary human consciousness’.
The joyful and exuberantly social consciousness of a young child is adapted to
share growth of the experience implicit in the form and style of agile body movement.
From birth, rhythms of movement with gestures that display our affective, vital states
of well-being or distress are shared in emotional attachment with caregivers. These
enable exercise of a ‘secondary consciousness’ in ‘primary intersubjectivity’, which
directly perceives both the affordances for action in the material world and of
collaborative awareness with the mental states of others, without mediation by
abstract, reflective thought.
As perceptual discrimination improves with growing postural and motor control,
a child’s playful engagements with objects and other persons take on longer durations,
increasing the range of prospective planning with affective appreciation, and
enriching a story of memories. Acquired meanings are held, not as a collection of
discrete and timeless facts, or simply as schemes for motor control of the sensorymotor Self, but as lived and embodied projects that unfold over time in active
participation with emotional companions, creating the foundation of our narrative
intelligence, which has its temporo-spatial, body-related, foundations in sub-cortical,
stem parts of the brain (Delafield-Butt & Trevarthen, 2015). With addition of cortical
capacities for holding details of experience ‘in mind’, consciousness develops the
abstract imagination with symbolic meaning of language and educated adult
consciousness. Then conceptually backed plans for intentions-to-act rather than
immediate intentions-in-action expand conscious experience to allow technical and
cultural mastery in its tertiary form. Infant and child psychology shows is that the
essential element, or core, of conscious awareness and intention with prospective
engagement in human story-making is evident from very early life.
Brain science of the evolution and development of limbic and ‘frontal
executive’ regions of the forebrain, and their reciprocal connections with brain stem
30
motive, motor and affective systems, confirms this theory of the regulation of learning
by motive impulses and emotions and their communication, supporting a richer
understanding of needs for early child-centered educational practices, and the
recognition and care of individuals with special abilities in the arts and sciences.
There are also important implications for the recognition of disorders of
consciousness and their causes in development. ‘Mental illnesses’, such as autism
spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, depression
and dementia, are found to be associated with early disturbance of the sense of time in
movement, and of emotions that protect the Self in action and in communication.
These call for treatment by ‘non-verbal’ or motor therapies that are complementary to
rational and verbal psychoanalysis (Stern, 2010). Further implications concern
interpretation of genetic factors and their expression within epigenetic systems of
morphogenesis in body and brain that regulate their expression. We need data to
distinguish effects of adaptive 'environment-dependent' learning from the patterns of
'environment-expectant', and ‘experience-seeking’ processes that may grow in the
brain, with affective regulations. An integrative approach to the early development of
human awareness is required that seeks information from neuroscience in relation to
the fine details of spontaneous expression of intentions and feelings, and how they
may animate immediate sympathetic responses from caring companions, generating
shared consciousness and the foundations for meaningful social understanding.
See also:
Constructivist theories; Learning theories; Dynamical systems approaches; Fetal
ultrasonography; Prenatal neural development; Prenatal development of the
musculoskeletal system in the human; Prenatal sensory development; Play; Status of
the human newborn; Cognitive development during infancy; Memory and learning;
Multisensory perception; Language acquisition; Social development; Emotional
development; Play; Selfhood; Socialization; Theory of mind; Perception and action;
Brain and behavioral development; Social neuroscience; Autism; Evidence of
evolution in human development
31
Further reading
Bråten, S. (2009). The intersubjective mirror in infant learning and evolution of
speech. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gallagher, S., & Zahavi, D. (2012). The phenomenological mind (2nd ed.). Oxford,
UK: Routledge.
Trevarthen, C. (2004). Brain development. In R.L. Gregory (Ed.) Oxford companion
to the mind (2nd ed.) (pp. 116-127). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press
Trevarthen, C. (2004). Infancy, mind in. In, R.L. Gregory (Ed.) Oxford companion to
the mind (2nd ed.) (pp. 455-464). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1926). Science and the modern world. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
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