2026/06/30 by Nele-Pauline Suffo, Anas Suffo, Pierre-Etienne Martin +4 · 1 voice
Psychology · #Action Observation and Synchronization #Agency (philosophy) #Child and Animal Learning Development #Everyday life #Language Development and Disorders #Naturalism #Naturalistic observation #Pipeline (software) #Social relation #Social relationship
paper · doi:10.31234/osf.io/bmz3e_v1
openalex publication_date 2026/06/30 · openalex created_date 2026/07/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Everyday social interactions shape human psychological development. Research, however, has primarily relied on controlled settings or brief observations; consequently, the nature of naturalistic everyday experiences remains largely unstudied. To address this gap, we developed an automated multimodal processing pipeline to analyze a large egocentric corpus of naturalistic everyday experiences from 107 children aged three to five years in Germany (267.52 hours). The pipeline detects faces, persons, proximity, and speech types to classify time into interacting, available, or alone states. Results indicate a significant ecological reorganization: social interaction dominates at age three and declines towards a more even distribution between states at age six. Conversational agency remains stable throughout preschool, with children sharing it nearly equally with conversational partners. Crucially, social interactions change in their structure in that isolated social cues become significantly less predictive of interactions with age. Thus, preschool social interactions become less frequent but more diverse with development.