Children’s Sociability in Institutional Contexts : Theoretical Reflections on Cognitive Development Within Peer Interactions

ARENA OF DEVELOPMENT Children’s Sociability in Institutional Contexts: Theoretical Reflections on Cognitive Development Within Peer Interactions Juliene Madureira Ferreira 1 &Gabriella Garcia Moura 2 & Gabriela Sousa de Melo Mieto 3 Received: 5 February 2020 /Revised: 1 April 2020 /Accepted: 4 April 2020 #The Author(s) 2020 Abstract Human beings are constituted through the presence and actions of others whom they encounter during the course of their lives. We are constituted by all the interactions we enact in different social contexts and through all the meanings we create together about the experiences we share. Therefore, in order to understand the ontogenesis of cognition, one must understand how meanings are constructed with the others we encounter. A substantial amount of research has addressed how infants and toddlers—when in interaction with adults—are able to understand others’actions and engage in social dynamics by coordinating and regulating adults’actions. This knowledge has advanced the field of developmental psychology significantly. However, not many efforts have been made to understand the origins of social cognition via peer interactions or explore how peer interactions constitute cognitive development. In this theoretical article, we use the microanalysis of three peer interaction episodes to discuss how the constitutive role of peer experiences can be analysed beyond isolated individual processes. The encounter, the situation and the social and relational process are used as a unit of analysis. This analytical approach considers the contributions and insights provided by the enactive theory, which offers a perspective to understand the processes of cognitive development in interactive experiences. Keywords Peer interactions .Children’s sociability.Intersubjectivity.Embodiment Human Arenas https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-020-00113-x *Juliene Madureira Ferreira [email protected] *Gabriella Garcia Moura [email protected]; https://orcid.org/0000–0002–0123–0372 Gabriela Sousa de Melo Mieto [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article Introduction Investigations about the ontogenesis of human cognition have been conducted for almost a century from different theoretical and methodological perspectives (Bandura 1977; Bruner 1983;Hunt1980; Piaget 1987; Stenberg 1979;VanDijk1980; Vygotsky 1978,1995; Wallon 1945). Among the diverse theoretical approaches, socio-interactionism is recognised as a fundamental framework that has influenced significantly the research conducted in the fields of psychology, education and social sciences. The socio-interactionist viewpoint holds that social interactions and relations are the constitutive pillars of the complex functions of human cognition (Bruner 1983; Vygotsky 1978,1995;Wallon1945). Human beings are constituted through the presence and actions (mediation) of others they encounter over the course of their lives. In other words, we are constituted by all the interactions we enact in different social contexts and through all the meanings we create jointly about the experiences we share. Therefore, in order to understand the ontogenetic origins of cognition, one must understand how meanings are constructed with all the different others we encounter, within our social, biological, historical, cultural, political, material and other spheres of existence (Rodríguez 1999,2006; Rossetti-Ferreiro et al. 2007; Tomasello 1999; Trevarthen 1979,2015). This, undoubtedly, is a demanding task. In this study, we examined how meaningful engagement constructed through/in experiences of peer interaction, since a very young age, is constitutive of human cognition. Accordingly, we dialogued with the notions of embodiment, enaction and situatedness (De Jaegher 2010,2013; De Jaegher et al. 2017; Reddy 2008,2010), and supported by a microanalysis of three different episodes of peer interaction, we discussed the elements (e.g. coordinated, collaborative and communicative acts) that reveal the intersubjectivity among small children. Our analysis went beyond individual processes (i.e. regulation of behaviour from A to B) and used the encounter, the situation and the social and relational processes as a unit of analysis to understand the processes of cognitive development. Peer Interactions in Ontogenetic Development Since the 1970s, there has been a growing interest in forms of sociability among children (Pedrosa and Carvalho 2009), and research has shifted away from the focus on adult-child dyadic relationships to explore the implications of peer relationships in developmental processes. As a result, a solid corpus of theoretical and empirical studies, from diverse frameworks, has evidenced peer relations as a sine qua non condition for infants’social cognitive development (Berndt and Ladd 1989). With technological advances allowing simultaneous analysis of individual, dyadic and group variables (Bradley and Smithson 2017), and by analysing children’s interactions and relations, scholars have expanded the discussion about the different levels of complexity in children’s social experience of participation in their peers’ lives (Rubin et al. 2008). Within the specific field of early childhood, new studies have shown that infants and toddlers interact with peers from a very early age (Amorim et al. 2012), highlighting differential patterns of communicative and expressive resources (Mendes and Seidl-deMoura 2009) and specificities in the development of social engagement (Costa and Amorim 2015; Moura et al. 2020). Other studies, discussing intermodal sensorimotor processes with synchronisation and coordination of actions, have shown how babies’interactions promote advances in children’s ability to imitate their social partners, and through imitation, their Ferreira et al. behavioural and communicative repertoires expand (Bussab et al. 2007; Ferreira 2017). In the same way, objects, toys and even the peer’s actions have been shown to be attractive to infants, allowing, for example, the establishment of baby-baby-object interactions, which are considered fundamental for the development of joint attention (Costa and Amorim 2015) and coordinated joint engagement (Moura et al. 2020). Therefore, it is widely known that interactions between children provide rich opportunities for developing interpersonal skills such as support, cooperation, empathy, imitation, learning and a wide range of children’s competencies (Rubin et al. 2008). Thus, the developmental significance of peer experiences is unquestionable (Parker et al. 2006). On the basis of a critical analysis of the literature on peer interactions and relationships, Rubin et al. (2008) identified two important gaps: first, the current studies should seek to understand how interactive elements affect peers in different ways (i.e. how these experiences of interaction differ from child to child), and second, although friendship, peer acceptance and peer network, among other topics, can be studied extensively, very little is known about the specific experiences of sociality, which justifying questions such as what do children learn from these relationships? and what do these experiences provide to children? While these questions and proposals are very important and should be considered for further investigation, in our view, these issues still lean towards an individualistic perspective of implications of peer encounters. It is observed that the focus on the sociability of small children has been addressed via a perspective that centralises cognition as a process happening inside each (individual) organism (Amorim et al. 2012). Thus, even though cognition is a social phenomenon, the processes are discussed from the perspective of what the individual is able to think, express and do. Individual differences in peer experiences, individual patterns of adaptation and maladaptation when interacting with another child and the attribution of meanings to each other’s actions are analysed to determine the variation in success or failure of peer adjustment. To mitigate the overemphasis on the individual perspective, we agree with previous studies that have pointed to the need for amplifying how an infant’s sociability—ability to engage in meaningful interactions—can be analysed by recognising the relevance of peers since an early age (Amorim et al. 2012; Bradley and Smithson 2017; Bussab 1997; Carvalho and Rubiano 2004; Rubin et al. 2008; Parker et al. 2006; Viana and Pedrosa 2014). Further, we understand that when broadening the view on the forms of child’s sociability, it is necessary to consider intersubjectivity as the space for the construction of meaning and, beyond individual mental processes, treat the experience of the interaction per se as a unit of analysis (De Jaegher 2010; Reddy 2010). Seeking to contribute in this direction, we aim at discussing the constitutive role of peer interaction, going beyond the individual processes of A and B (i.e. beyond the focus on the regulation of behaviour from A to B), and highlighting the encounter, the situation and the social and relational process as a unit of analysis to understand the constituent aspects of human cognition. Our approach frames phenomena that are considered essential for defining sociability (i.e. coordination, collaboration and communication) under a traditional developmental psychology perspective; however, it takes a different route to understand the emergence of such processes within peer interaction. We introduce an embodied footprint into the analysis, stressing the role of the body in children’s sociability. The Role of the Body and the Experience of Interaction as a Unit of Analysis Socio-interactionist assumptions suggest that the constitutive processes of the subject are anchored in their actions and interactions with the physical, social and cultural world. Further, Children’s sociability in institutional contexts development is understood as a product of interactions between individuals and their environment (Rodríguez 1999,2006; Rossetti-Ferreiro et al. 2007; Tomasello 1999; Trevarthen 1979,2015). According to Werebe and Nadel-Brulfert (1999,p.19),itis‘thanks to interindividual relations of sociability that your life opens up to development’. Thus, a discussion on child development under this approach implies reflecting on how interactions and experiences constitute this process. But then, what is required for a person to act and interact in this physical and sociocultural world? If cognition takes place in the social world, what does it mean to consider the experience as a unit of analysis? To conceptually clarify what we call ‘experience’, it is necessary to explore how this interaction and action take place in the context of the person in question. In this sense, we bring to the dialogue theoretical discussions and empirical studies in the field of embodied cognition to highlight two important aspects: the role of the body in cognition (Glenberg 2010; Uithol and Gallese 2015) and the understanding that interaction is not the summary of two individual perspectives but the co-creation of a new perspective shared by two or more people (De Jaegher et al. 2017). That the body plays an important role in the ontogenesis of cognition is not a new knowledge. Piaget (1987) devoted much of his research to understanding the adaptive mechanisms involved in knowledge construction. According to Piaget (1987), from birth, children engage in action because their own biology drives them to act. Therefore, intelligence, from a Piagetian perspective, is a particular case of biological adaptation in which the child interacts with the physical world and, through adaptive mechanisms, builds knowledge about this world (Rodríguez 1999). Vygotsky (1978,1995), breaking the dualist tradition of the physical world versus the social world, and understanding human beings as biologically cultural, had already noted that ‘man’s behaviour is formed by the peculiarities, biological and social conditions of his birth’(p. 63). In this sense, it is constituted by the possibilities of perceiving and acting (moving) in the world, marked by a social historicity. Under this perspective, the body plays the relevant role of a stimulus receptor, which impacts the process of cognitive development (Vygotsky 1978,1995). Within the realm of the body (biological element), the maturation of the central nervous system is responsible for the development of low level or primitive cognitive functions, such as perception, simple memory and involuntary attention, but the achievement of higher cognitive operations can only occur through social factors—psychological tools mediating thoughts, feelings and behaviour (Lindblom and Ziemke 2003). Cognition is understood as a process that starts first at the social level (between people-interpersonal) but has to later be internalised as an intra-psychological operation. Therefore, even despite being understood as a socially dependent phenomenon, cognition is internal, symbolic and framed in the individual’s mental operations. With the development of research in neurosciences and increase in studies on how infants understand other people’s actions (see Uithol and Paulus 2014), there is a wide range of evidence pointing to the constitutive role of the body in social cognition (Uithol and Gallese 2015). As Glenberg (2010) states clearly, to fully understand how the brain works (i.e. how the cognitive functions operate), one has to acknowledge its embodiment—the brain lives in a body, uses a body and gets all its sensations through the body. Therefore, the way we experience the world depends on our movement in it, because the only way that the brain talks to the environment is through the body. Although the physical body is essentially individual—it belongs to a single cognitive system—the experiences it entails surpass its singularity, thus resulting in a self that is social. Our bodily nature shapes our perceptions and allows us to construct a conception of others as other selves, incarnated in sensorimotor and Ferreira et al. capable physical bodies with capacities and experiences similar to ours (Gallese 2014; Uithol and Gallese 2015). Moreover, embodiment captures the idea of and emphasises how cognition develops in order to control a body rather than engage in abstract thought and how specific types of cognitive operations, such as action selection, are fundamentally embodied (Uithol and Gallese 2015). Embodied perspectives also assert that instead of passively receiving sensorial inputs and processing them, the brain actively uses the body to sample those inputs under all the conditions that having a body implies (i.e. its physiological characteristics, its situatedness, its history, etc.) (Di Paolo 2005). This means that having a specific body not only determines the access one may have to a certain environment (e.g. a baby that cannot walk but can sit on the floor is able to reach only the toys that are close by) but also defines the actions that one is (or not) capable to perform and the sensations one is able to perceive (e.g. a toothless baby who is unable to chew cannot experience the crunchiness of crackers). It is through these possibilities and limitations that individuals interact with the world. Therefore, when bringing embodied approaches to the analysis of peer interactions in natural contexts, particularly those of small children (0–4 years), we highlight the possibility of prioritising the elements that are related to the body—skills needed for action attunement (e.g. motor and fine-grained perception) and for the development of such attunement skills with reference to the first and progressive signs of action understanding. In line with this thought, Riviero (2003) calls for an approach to understand intentional communicative acts among small children—an approach that overcomes the divide between the mind of the sender or receiver, which make it a purely mental and individual issue, and focuses instead on the social, relational and observable process. For Riviero (2003), communicative intentionality is a hallmark of observable and contextualised human interaction. This is not restricted to cognitive processes that are independent of concrete actions and interactions but consider an embodied and personified process, situated in an interpersonal exchange that generates meaning. In this sense, it becomes necessary to elaborate a different way to approach and analyse interactions in natural contexts that focus on intersubjectivity by considering the experience of interaction, i.e. an experiential grid of dynamic, bodily, self-enacted differentiations (De Jaegher et al. 2017). According to Reddy (2008,2010,2012), one of the ways to rethink interactions between young children is by focusing on the perceptual processes of the experience and analysing them from a firstand second-person perspective (self and other perspective). This requires the researcher to bring in their own perceptions of the data. This approach focuses on what it takes for intersubjectivity—as a meaningful engagement with the environment—to emerge and considers the body in action a display of this process (Reddy 2008). Based on similar principles, the work of De Jaegher et al. (2017) offers theoretical and methodological support to an approach of looking at interactions between peers that evidences the construction of this intersubjectivity. By considering three references of perception (i.e. self, other perception and the modalities of sensing, feeling and thinking), De Jaegher et al. (2017) propose a systematic analytical process to determine what happens in the in-between of the interaction. Although we did not apply their method (PRISMA) fully, the framework has inspired our analytical pathway, leading us to believe that focusing on the perceptual process of the experience reveals important aspects of how peer interactions are important for the development of children’s sociability. Considering the dialogue constructed so far, in the following section, we present the analysis of three episodes of peer interaction, illustrating the possibilities of using the experience of interaction as a unit of analysis to investigate development. Children’s sociability in institutional contexts Peer Interaction in Analysis The episodes we present in this paper were selected from three different databases of video observations of child-child interactions in natural environments (see Table 1). The databases were constructed in previous and parallel studies conducted independently by each of the three authors, in three different institutional contexts: institutional foster care service (in children’s shelter mode), kindergarten and day-care centre. The studies (Ferreira 2017; Mieto and Cavaton 2015;Moura2012) shared the theoretical basis of a socio-interactionist framework and the interest in micro-genetic analyses of interactive episodes. They sought to understand processes of cognitive, communicative and socio-affective development of children in contexts of collective care. It is important to highlight that in Brazil, these three institutional contexts have distinct history, characteristic and organisation modes. Foster care services are provided by specific institutions, which are configured as an exceptional temporary setting for protective measures for children and adolescent in vulnerable condition (e.g. victims of abuse, violence or any forms of neglect) waiting for reintegrating into their family of origin or a substitute family (adoption). Institutional foster care can be offered in two modalities: (1) foster shelter, institution with capacity for up to 20 children/young people, or (2) foster home, residential unit with capacity for up to 10 children/young people, where at least one caregiver resides. In the present study, data comes from a foster shelter for children aged 0 to 3 years (or up to 6 years, in the case of groups of siblings). Although foster care is historically rooted in the philanthropic and welfare activities of religious entities, these institutions are nowadays part of the National Social Assistance System (SUAS) and seek to strengthen its identity as a socialeducational community (Moura 2017). Regarding the reality in day-care centres and kindergarten, in Brazil, these institutions are part of early childhood education and care system, and like other Latin American countries, they originated with welfare practices that emphasised different care routines to keep children safe while their families were working. With the advancement of studies on children’s development, the emphasis on educational processes raised, and access to the system became a children’s right. Day-care centres and kindergarten can be either private or public institutions. Day-care centres are responsible for offering care and developmental programs for 0-to-3years-old infants. The organisation of care services for this age group is under the responsibility of municipalities, which then regulates the functioning of such institutions. As for kindergarten, the main goal is to provide instructive programs for specific age groups of children, usually targeting 3-to-5-years-old children. Most kindergarten programs have one Table 1 General information about the database Episode Place, year Age groups Rights for usage of the data Peer interaction in institutional care (117 s) São Paulo, 2010 0–3 year-old University of Sao Paulo, Department of Psychology (Moura 2012) Peer interaction in a day care (93 s) Brasília, 2016 1–3 year-old University of Brasília, Department of Psychology (Mieto and Cavaton 2015) Peer interaction in kindergarten (115 s) Minas Gerais, 2018 3–5 year-old Tampere University, Faculty of Education and Culture (Ferreira 2018) Ferreira et al. certified teacher and one teacher assistant for each class group, and they can receive a number of 15 to 25 children in the same classroom. The focus on educational practices has become central to the functioning of kindergartens, demanding the reorganisation of the institutions and a transition period for employees to update their education and training. This service is under the responsibility of the municipalities, which then regulate the institutional organisation and assess the quality of the service being offered. Therefore, the infrastructure, the organisation and the service itself can vary significantly depending on the area and the municipality where the institution is located. In this way, we acknowledge that, as important contexts of development and socialisation in early childhood, collective care environments represent, in their own way, challenges and provide opportunities for open peer interactions among small children. The combination of the three institutional settings highlights distinct ways in which interaction can occur. After sharing these databases, we chose three interactive episodes, one from each context, using the following selection criteria: a scene that contemplated an interactive process between peers that entailed reciprocity, mutuality in the direction of behaviours and coordination (joint and mutually directed actions). The analysis was carried out via ELAN, a free software for video analysis (Brugman et al. 2004), which allowed us to isolate different types of movements (e.g. locomotion and object exploration), speech and gaze direction, as well as to identify their sequential relation with other’s movements within the episode. The software improved the analysis of actions, movements and verbal and non-verbal expressions within the interactions and allowed us to apprehend how they occurred throughout the recording, illustrating the dynamics and (trans)formations of the interactions over a period of time. The microanalysis of each episode began by identifying the movements of the participants within a threshold of 5 s. Using this material, and inspired by the embodiment proposed by De Jaegher et al. (2017), we focused on the perceptual process of the experience and constructed a grid of experiential dynamics from our perceptions of the children’ssensing,feelingand thinking (see Fig. 1). We focused specifically on the children’s movements to identify what each child could sense given their situatedness in the environment—what the child could sense and feel and how this manifested in movements/actions. We identified the origins of the engagement that led to joint and mutually directed action. In the sequence, we also analysed the moments where one child’s movement (e.g. sitting in front of and looking at the peer) became part of the peer’s field of senses (e.g. the child enters the peer’s visual field and establishes a sensorial contact-gaze) or intersected with the peer’s movements, creating a situation where intentions towards the other were evoked, i.e. a situation that demands one to respond and engage in a way that no other circumstance would. Those particular moments were considered as significant engagements (Reddy 2015)—the dynamic evidencing the intersubjectivity being constructed in interaction. The analysis of the perceptual process of experience was carried out under an inductive model. That is, video data was analysed without the selection of predetermined observable behaviours. The researchers applied their own references of perception to different aspects of the interaction (e.g. moving, exploring objects, touching, etc.) (De Jaegher et al. 2017). Thus, each interaction revealed, in the course of its life, a specific significant engagement. The researchers paid attention to what emerged in the in-between and constructed an understanding of what, in that particular interaction, supported intersubjectivity. Each researcher had their own perception, stemming from not only their way of sensing, feeling and thinking but also from their knowledge of specific dynamics and processes of sociability as well as the institutional setting where the interaction was recorded. The individual analyses were plotted Children’s sociability in institutional contexts on a matrix of perceptions, which were then questioned, compared and refined to construct the final outcome of the interactions investigated. In the following section, we present a detailed description of each episode of interaction, followed by the results of the analysis and discussions that are related to each context. The Episodes Episode 1 Peer interaction in institutional care—Construction of coordinated acts The reported episode took place in the balcony of an institutional care facility (approximately 45 m2of open space furniture only with a couple of plastic chairs), which was responsible for the social care of children from 0 to 6 years old. The duration of the episode was 1 min and 44 s, and the participants were two babies: Lucas (9 months and 26 days), who was in a walker, and Rosa (8 months and 7 days), who was sitting on the floor. Together with the babies were other children (similarly aged) and three adults (one staff and volunteers). The adults played a secondary role in the interaction. Lucas (sitting on a walker) looks at Rosa (sitting on the floor on the other side of the room) and moves towards her. Rosa, realising Lucas’approach, turns her body towards him (resting her hands on the floor and turning her body) and reaches for Lucas's walker, pulling the object towards her and bringing him even closer. Rosa looks at Lucas’walker carefully, and at the same time Lucas (from a standing perspective) gazes at Rosa (about 6 seconds). Lucas babbles (‘ehhh ... ehhh ...’), raises his arms, claps his hands and turns and moves away from Rosa. After approximately 3 seconds, he stops the walker, turns Fig. 1 Diagram of microanalysis. Source: produced by the authors Ferreira et al. his body and looks back at Rosa, smiling. Rosa had followed Lucas’smovementsaway from, and when he looks at her, she returns his gaze. Both infants start to move towards each other –Lucas with the walker and Rosa crawling. Lucas mumbles and smiles while sliding his walker towards Rosa. Rosa crawls until she can touch the walker (approximately 3 seconds). Seconds later, Lucas starts to move around with the walker again, coordinating movements and smiles –walking backward and forward, keeping a close eye on the girl’s face. In turn, Rosa begins to follow Lucas’movements, turning her body, in coordinated movements, towards Lucas's walker and crawling towards him. Continuing the backward and forward movement, sliding around Rosa, Lucas jumps, smiles and keeps a close eye on her. And Rosa attempts to reach him, crawling and stretching her arms until she sits down again, halting her gaze under Lucas's face. At this moment, Lucas approaches her, looks at her and stays close, so Rosa manages to hold and pull the walker. Clutching the walker, Rosa moves her arms, as if drawing the walker close and moving it, controlling its proximity and distance. Lucas continues to watch Rosa. Suddenly, Lucas stammers away and slides across the room with the walker. Rosa follows him again, with movements and glances. Rosa keeps her attention focused on Lucas's movements as he glides around. Lucas keeps looking at Rosa, while moving, raising his arms and babbling. Suddenly, Lucas runs towards Rosa and bumps into her. At that moment, Rosa looks at her feet and then at Lucas. In the background, the volunteer says to Rosa, ‘Aiii! my little foot... how bad!’ShethentellsLucas,‘Don't run!’Rosa listens and then turns her body, resting her hand on the floor and looking at the volunteer. Noticing Rosa's gaze, the volunteer continues, ‘Hey, didn’t you want to leave your walker? You’re crying to go to the ground...’. Rosa turns her attention from the volunteer and gazes back at Lucas, who is still sliding the walker across the balcony while smiling at Rosa. Rosa crawls back towards Lucas, who runs off, smiling and babbling, continuing the previous dynamic. In this episode, from Lucas’erect point of view, he could perceive the amplitude of the space, how it was arranged, the different objects placed on the floor and other people occupying different positions. At the same time, Lucas was also able to feel the constraints of the walker and how his feet barely touched the ground. He was thus forced to use his body to push himself from an inert state to start walking around the space. Lucas was then able to identify Rosa as an element of interest, establish the possible trajectories for locomotion and place in action the movement towards her. The interest for Rosa (or the intention to interact with Rosa) is evident in the pairing of the gaze direction, its fixation over time, the direction of the movement towards the peer and the cessation of the movement when Lucas reached Rosa’s feet. In parallel, sitting on the floor in the middle of the room was Rosa. From her seated position (Rosa could not stand on her own yet), her perceptual field comprised the toys immediately in front of her and the amplitude of the space. Her position also allowed her to feel the body tension necessary for her to continue sitting or to move (crawl), apart from the material features of each object (toys) in front of her. Her actions were then related to the exploration of this immediate material world. When Lucas started to approach her, the sounds made by the approaching walker and Lucas’laughter immediately entered Rosa’s perceptual field. She changed her position by placing her hands on the floor and turning her body towards her peer, seconds before he reached where she was (anticipating his presence). With the encounter, Rosa could then perceive specific features of the object (shape, colour and height of the walker), and Children’s sociability in institutional contexts the need for analysing peer interactions from the complex viewpoint of experience— considering not only what is produced by each of the participants in relation to the other in the dyad (straightforward regulation of behaviour) but mainly what the encounter per se has allowed the participants to create together. For such an approach, we referenced sociointeractionist perspectives and theoretical and empirical studies about embodied cognition, focusing specifically on the evidence on the role of the body and particularly its action in cognition and how intersubjectivity guides this exchange (De Jaegher 2013; Reddy 2008). The views of embodiment offered new perspectives on the analysis of peer interactions in natural environments, supporting, in particular, the focus on perceptions, feelings and actions to reveal significant engagements. In the paper, we presented three episodes of peer interactions in natural institutional contexts in Brazil, followed by their analyses and discussions. The different episodes allowed the identification of three different elements of how sense-making in peer interactions can reveal important cognitive operations, such as constructing coordinated, collaborative and communicative acts, even if it occur in distinct moments of the development. These three elements in this work are suggestive of the origins of one of the most complex forms of cognition related to social competence—our sophisticated capacity to engage with others (De Jaegher 2019). Nevertheless, from a generic perspective, in all three episodes, we are able to identify, first, how other’s‘goal-directed actions towards ourselves have a different phenomenal quality from that of actions towards other elements in the world’(Reddy 2015,p.24).In other words, other’s actions towards ourselves are relevant also to infants. Second, the process of signification in interactions among small children occurs through sensing, feeling and acting in the interaction. Since peers have an equivalent history and perceive the world with similar eyes (as a conspecific), the accumulated culture is not transmitted (mediated) by a more experienced partner; however, signification is built considering all the affordances of the environment that embed children in a specific cultural context. Third, the episodes allow us to reflect on the undeniable role of the body and intersubjectivity as a process that sustain this interaction and constitute cognitive development. Enlarging the views of cognitivist approaches, the microanalysis of this empirical data reveal how in the coordinative, collaborative and communicative acts cognition is shaped by the bodily experience. Thus, the process of meaning-making takes place at a level of interpersonal perception, in tune with their own embodied experiences in each environment (Amorim and Rossetti-Ferreira 2008; Moura et al. 2020). While the body’s physiology integrates movement and emotion so that the motor aspects of emotions (e.g. body’s enactment, facial expressions and visceral activity of the organism) as well as the body’s tonic activity and postural impressions enable a range of sensations and perceptions for the infant (Wallon 1945), the expressive dimension of movement enables communication—dialogue—even if it is a ‘silent dialogue’(Scorsolini-Comin and Amorim 2010). Thus, despite infants’dependence and frailty, their expressiveness is highly effective in triggering other’s attention. Infants’facial, vocal and bodily manifestations are visible to the other (adult or child) and are potent resources for interaction. Expressiveness is developed throughout life, and it becomes more sophisticated as children develop, been positively correlated to social competence in school context (Lindsey 2019). In this study, the episode with 3-to-5-years-old children shows how the expressiveness was incorporated to gesturing and speech, supporting the construction of a narrative that led the actions within the interaction. Ferreira et al. Further, infants learn by observing and experiencing the actions of other children (Lucena and Pedrosa 2014). Learning is not as a synonym for acquisition (a final product achieved) but a dynamic process of perception-action (Costa and Amorim 2018) that involves imitations, confrontations and recognitions. For example, observation enables the infant to realise that the peer’s action on an object results in a specific effect (a noise, movement, an opening of a door, a change in colour, etc.). Later on, observation will be a key element for small children to engage in complex social interaction, which demands sophisticated action coordination and collaborative dynamics to engage in social play routines. In line, the affective aspects of this interaction such as the smile are powerful communicative resources that ensure the maintenance of attention and mutual engagement. If in infant-infant interaction in day-care centres, smiles promote more responses and reactions among pairs of babies than crying, for preschool age children, smile becomes already part of the communication; it regulated the engagement and signals the valence in meaning-making. Moreover, babies/children not only smile at peers but with peers (Dentz 2016). Thus, it is verified that through various expressive and communicative resources (including emotions, vocalisations, gestures and movements), infants as well as small children address each other and (co)respond mutually (Amorim et al. 2012;Costa and Amorim 2015; Moura et al. 2020). Therefore, it is precisely in the possibilities of the experience with the other—as evidenced in the dynamic of approaching and distancing in episode 1, in communicating in episode 3 and in the different attempts to push the cart in episode 2—that children refine this process of understanding/being part of the other’s action. This process of experimentation in the perceptual field enables them to understand the other. This shared meaning among peers permeates the body, beyond trivial forms (dependence on different organs and physical systems), and influences how experience, and consequently cognitive processes, will take place. We agree with Uithol and Gallese (2015)thatwhen such a situation arises, it is necessary to recognise that cognitive processes performed throughout the interaction experience (e.g. emotion recognition, joint attention, joint action, etc.) are body dependent. Conclusions In order to answer comprehensively the question raised in this special issue—how do culture and semiosis shape cognition—we believe that several subjects still need to be addressed, particularly the integration of different theoretical perspectives and fields of science, the development of methodologies that support the investigation in natural environments and the exploration of the constitutive role of peers as a significant other since an early age. In this paper, we have outlined how peer interactions feature some of the elements identified empirically in previous research on adult-child interaction, such as the construction of coordinated actions, collaboration and communicative acts. We believe that the way to advance our understanding of the ontogenesis of human cognition is to investigate human capacity for intersubjectivity—the mechanisms involving it, as well as how it develops, or how it complexifies along life. Developing methodologies for exploring intersubjectivity can contribute significantly to this goal. Authors’Contribution Ferreira and Moura contributed equally to the manuscript and thus share the first authorship. Children’s sociability in institutional contexts Funding Information The empirical data presented in this paper were collected with the help of funding from the FAPESP (São Paulo State Research Support Foundation—Number Process: 2013/06012-0) and UAMSantander Interuniversity Cooperation Project with Latin America (Number Process: CEAL-AL/2015-28). Compliance with Ethical Standards Conflict of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. References Amorim, K. S., Anjos, A. M., & Rossetti-Ferreira, M. C. (2012). Processos interativos de bebês em creche. 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Proposições para uma leitura de Wallon: em que aspectos sua obra permanece atual e original? São Paulo: Àtica. Publisher’sNote Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Affiliations Juliene Madureira Ferreira 1 &Gabriella Garcia Moura 2 &Gabriela Sousa de Melo Mieto 3 1 Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland 2 Department of Social Psychology and Development, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil 3 Institute of Psychology, Department of School Psychology and Development, University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil Children’s sociability in institutional contexts