A two-person neuroscience perspective on parent-infant dyadic expansion of consciousness.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience January 1, 2026 Giorgia Procissi, Elena Capelli, Beatrice Riva et al.
Caregiver-infant interaction is the space where development unfolds over time. The mutual regulation model (MRM) holds that meaning-making, emotion regulation, and stress resilience emerge from the fabric of these interactions. Within MRM, dyadic expansion of consciousness (DEC) describes how caregivers and infants co-create an expanded, more complex state of consciousness through reciprocal interactions and alternating phases of matching, mismatching, and reparation. The Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm (FFSF) experimentally manipulates caregiver availability to study these early exchanges. Recent developmental hyperscanning protocols promise to investigate DEC by exploring inter-brain coupling and uncoupling, potentially revealing a “two-brained system” that produces dyadic meanings through synchronized neural networks.