Naturalistic Interactions Research Articles

The Nature and Structure of Mothers’ Parenting Their Infants

SYNOPSIS Objective. To test three competing models of the nature and structure of maternal parenting practices with infants in U.S. national and multiple international samples. The three models were a one-factor dimensional model, a multi-factor style model, and a hybrid two-factor/six-domain model. Undertaking this evaluation of parenting with national and international samples permits a wide yet judicious analysis of culture-common versus culture-specific models of maternal parenting practices with young infants. Design. Basic caregiving practices of primiparous mothers with their 5-month-old infants during naturalistic interactions at home in nine different cultures were videorecorded, microcoded, and analyzed. Individual practices were organized into nurture, physical, social, didactic, material, and language domains. Results. In Study 1 using a U.S. sample (N = 360), analyses of the structure of mothers’ parenting practices yielded a best-fitting two-factor/six-domain structure. In Study 2, using a 9-nation sample (N = 653), the two-factor/six-domain structure was largely replicated and partial metric invariance achieved. Conclusions. Mothers’ parenting in the middle of the first year of their infant’s life is commonly structured and adapted to the universal needs and developmental tasks of infants’ surviving and thriving.

Naturalistic Parent Teaching in the Home Environment During Early Childhood.

Children’s sociocultural experiences in their day-to-day lives markedly play a key role in learning about the world. This study investigated parent–child teaching during early childhood as it naturally occurs in the home setting. Thirty-nine families’ naturalistic interactions in the home setting were observed; 1033 teaching sequences were identified based on detailed transcriptions of verbal and non-verbal behavior. Within these sequences, three domains of learning (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) and subtopics were identified and analyzed in relation to gender, child birth order, context, teaching strategies, and learner response. Findings show knowledge, skills, and dispositions were taught equally, marked by the most prominent subtopics taught within each domain, including cognitive (skill), game rule (knowledge), and social rule (disposition). Further, mothers and fathers were found to teach their children equally, however, fathers taught knowledge more than mothers, whereas mothers taught dispositions more than fathers. Differences between domains of learning and subtopics also existed between mother’s and father’s teaching based on child birth order and gender. This study also assessed the contrast between teaching knowledge, skills, and dispositions by context, parent teaching strategies, and child learner response. Results support the notion that family interactions in the home setting set a stage for children’s rich informal learning experiences. Vygotskian sociocultural conceptions underpin this research and findings are discussed using this central theoretical lens.

Social EEG: A novel neurodevelopmental approach to studying brain-behavior links and brain-to-brain synchrony during naturalistic toddler-parent interactions.

Despite increasing emphasis on emergent brain-behavior patterns supporting language, cognitive, and socioemotional development in toddlerhood, methodologic challenges impede their characterization. Toddlers are notoriously difficult to engage in brain research, leaving a developmental window in which neural processes are understudied. Further, electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potential paradigms at this age typically employ structured, experimental tasks that rarely reflect formative naturalistic interactions with caregivers. Here, we introduce and provide proof of concept for a new "Social EEG" paradigm, in which parent-toddler dyads interact naturally during EEG recording. Parents and toddlers sit at a table together and engage in different activities, such as book sharing or watching a movie. EEG is time locked to the video recording of their interaction. Offline, behavioral data are microcoded with mutually exclusive engagement state codes. From 216 sessions to date with 2- and 3-year-old toddlers and their parents, 72% of dyads successfully completed the full Social EEG paradigm, suggesting that it is possible to collect dual EEG from parents and toddlers during naturalistic interactions. In addition to providing naturalistic information about child neural development within the caregiving context, this paradigm holds promise for examination of emerging constructs such as brain-to-brain synchrony in parents and children.

Who Speaks with My Synthesized Voice? Some Roles of Other-initiated Repair in Augmented Intaraction

As conversation analysis shows, all talk is highly collaborative, and meaning is created dialogically and sequentially, via the concerted actions of all the participants involved. In the case of people with communication impairments, the collaborative character of talk is even more manifest. A speaker with dysarthria, for example, may communicate through typing their messages to a text-to-speech communication app or device, using a communication (alphabet) board, or gazing at objects. This article focuses on one type of co-construction effort aimed at helping an augmented speaker to communicate, a process that can be called other-initiated repair. Although this practice is a common way of achieving understanding with people who have communication needs, in some cases repair initiation is used to do more than that. In this paper, I conduct conversation analysis of a video-recording of naturalistic interactions inside a Russian-speaking family involving a 10-year-old girl with dysarthria who communicates with her parents through an eyetracker-controlled computer interface. In this case, her parents use the structural position of repair initiation on the girl’s words not only to clarify the meaning of her message but to continue the preceding polemics over the mom’s birthday present. I argue that although this is just one instance of the use of other-repair in playful communication between family members, The potentiality of providing the type of guessing which aligns with the guesser’s interests is present in other repair sequences. This can be consequential for lives of people with communication needs when done in more official settings. Studying similar repair sequences can help better delineate 'good' scaffolding strategies in co-construction of speech of someone with communication needs.

The use of virtual reality in environment experiences and the importance of realism

IntroductionVirtual reality (VR) can be extremely useful in simulating nature when physical presence is not possible. Additionally, it allows for environments to be customised (e.g., weather, or topography) and facilitates the design of controlled experimental settings. However, VR can involve the use of expensive equipment and complex software to create highly realistic immersive experiences. But is it necessary for experiences to rival the latest Hollywood blockbuster? This paper explores whether such investment can be valuable in research on nature experiences. StudiesTwo studies were conducted to examine how realism of environmental presentations impact affective responses and participant perceptions. Study One (n = 16) explored perceptions of the same lake presented to participants in the real world, in VR and as a video. Study Two (n = 120) compared participant's affective responses to one of four possible virtual environments differing in level of realism (high or low) and type (natural or built). ResultsStudy One showed that experiences of VR presentations fell between real and video presentations. Study Two found that more realistic VR environments evoked more positive affective and serenity responses, as well as a greater sense of presence. In both studies, participants stressed the importance of naturalistic interaction, sensory immersion, and graphical realism in the experiences, which may help explain these effects. ConclusionThe level of realism that can be attained with VR does impact affective responses and perceptions. Investment in VR for future research can be highly beneficial.

Proximity and touch are associated with neural but not physiological synchrony in naturalistic mother-infant interactions

Caregiver touch plays a vital role in infants’ growth and development, but its role as a communicative signal in human parent-infant interactions is surprisingly poorly understood. Here, we assessed whether touch and proximity in caregiver-infant dyads are related to neural and physiological synchrony. We simultaneously measured brain activity and respiratory sinus arrhythmia of 4–6-month-old infants and their mothers (N=69 dyads) in distal and proximal joint watching conditions as well as in an interactive face-to-face condition. Neural synchrony was higher during the proximal than during the distal joint watching conditions, and even higher during the face-to-face interaction. Physiological synchrony was highest during the face-to-face interaction and lower in both joint watching conditions, irrespective of proximity. Maternal affectionate touch during the face-to-face interaction was positively related to neural but not physiological synchrony. This is the first evidence that touch mediates mutual attunement of brain activities, but not cardio-respiratory rhythms in caregiver-infant dyads during naturalistic interactions. Our results also suggest that neural synchrony serves as a biological pathway of how social touch plays into infant development and how this pathway could be utilized to support infant learning and social bonding.

Natural Variability in Parent-Child Puzzle Play at Home.

Here, we observed 3- to 4-year-old children (N=31) and their parents playing with puzzles at home during a zoom session to provide insight into the variability of the kinds of puzzles children have in their home, and the variability in how children and their parents play with spatial toys. We observed a large amount of variability in both children and parents’ behaviors, and in the puzzles they selected. Further, we found relations between parents’ and children’s behaviors. For example, parents provided more scaffolding behaviors for younger children and parents’ persistence-focused language was related to more child attempts after failure. Altogether, the present work shows how using methods of observing children at a distance, we can gain insight into the environment in which they are developing. The results are discussed in terms of how variability in spatial toys and spatial play during naturalistic interactions can help us contextualize the conclusions we draw from lab-based studies.

Hybrid Harmony: A Multi-Person Neurofeedback Application for Interpersonal Synchrony.

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in studies measuring brain activity, physiological responses, and/or movement data from multiple individuals during social interaction. For example, so-called "hyperscanning" research has demonstrated that brain activity may become synchronized across people as a function of a range of factors. Such findings not only underscore the potential of hyperscanning techniques to capture meaningful aspects of naturalistic interactions, but also raise the possibility that hyperscanning can be leveraged as a tool to help improve such naturalistic interactions. Building on our previous work showing that exposing dyads to real-time inter-brain synchrony neurofeedback may help boost their interpersonal connectedness, we describe the biofeedback application Hybrid Harmony, a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) that supports the simultaneous recording of multiple neurophysiological datastreams and the real-time visualization and sonification of inter-subject synchrony. We report results from 236 dyads experiencing synchrony neurofeedback during naturalistic face-to-face interactions, and show that pairs' social closeness and affective personality traits can be reliably captured with the inter-brain synchrony neurofeedback protocol, which incorporates several different online inter-subject connectivity analyses that can be applied interchangeably. Hybrid Harmony can be used by researchers who wish to study the effects of synchrony biofeedback, and by biofeedback artists and serious game developers who wish to incorporate multiplayer situations into their practice.

Emotional Expression in Children With ASD: A Pre-Study on a Two-Group Pre-Post-Test Design Comparing Robot-Based and Computer-Based Training.

Several studies have found a delay in the development of facial emotion recognition and expression in children with an autism spectrum condition (ASC). Several interventions have been designed to help children to fill this gap. Most of them adopt technological devices (i.e., robots, computers, and avatars) as social mediators and reported evidence of improvement. Few interventions have aimed at promoting emotion recognition and expression abilities and, among these, most have focused on emotion recognition. Moreover, a crucial point is the generalization of the ability acquired during treatment to naturalistic interactions. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of two technological-based interventions focused on the expression of basic emotions comparing a robot-based type of training with a “hybrid” computer-based one. Furthermore, we explored the engagement of the hybrid technological device introduced in the study as an intermediate step to facilitate the generalization of the acquired competencies in naturalistic settings. A two-group pre-post-test design was applied to a sample of 12 children (M = 9.33; ds = 2.19) with autism. The children were included in one of the two groups: group 1 received a robot-based type of training (n = 6); and group 2 received a computer-based type of training (n = 6). Pre- and post-intervention evaluations (i.e., time) of facial expression and production of four basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, and anger) were performed. Non-parametric ANOVAs found significant time effects between pre- and post-interventions on the ability to recognize sadness [t(1) = 7.35, p = 0.006; pre: M (ds) = 4.58 (0.51); post: M (ds) = 5], and to express happiness [t(1) = 5.72, p = 0.016; pre: M (ds) = 3.25 (1.81); post: M (ds) = 4.25 (1.76)], and sadness [t(1) = 10.89, p < 0; pre: M (ds) = 1.5 (1.32); post: M (ds) = 3.42 (1.78)]. The group*time interactions were significant for fear [t(1) = 1.019, p = 0.03] and anger expression [t(1) = 1.039, p = 0.03]. However, Mann–Whitney comparisons did not show significant differences between robot-based and computer-based training. Finally, no difference was found in the levels of engagement comparing the two groups in terms of the number of voice prompts given during interventions. Albeit the results are preliminary and should be interpreted with caution, this study suggests that two types of technology-based training, one mediated via a humanoid robot and the other via a pre-settled video of a peer, perform similarly in promoting facial recognition and expression of basic emotions in children with an ASC. The findings represent the first step to generalize the abilities acquired in a laboratory-trained situation to naturalistic interactions.

A Guide to Parent-Child fNIRS Hyperscanning Data Processing and Analysis.

The use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning during naturalistic interactions in parent–child dyads has substantially advanced our understanding of the neurobiological underpinnings of human social interaction. However, despite the rise of developmental hyperscanning studies over the last years, analysis procedures have not yet been standardized and are often individually developed by each research team. This article offers a guide on parent–child fNIRS hyperscanning data analysis in MATLAB and R. We provide an example dataset of 20 dyads assessed during a cooperative versus individual problem-solving task, with brain signal acquired using 16 channels located over bilateral frontal and temporo-parietal areas. We use MATLAB toolboxes Homer2 and SPM for fNIRS to preprocess the acquired brain signal data and suggest a standardized procedure. Next, we calculate interpersonal neural synchrony between dyads using Wavelet Transform Coherence (WTC) and illustrate how to run a random pair analysis to control for spurious correlations in the signal. We then use RStudio to estimate Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) to account for the bounded distribution of coherence values for interpersonal neural synchrony analyses. With this guide, we hope to offer advice for future parent–child fNIRS hyperscanning investigations and to enhance replicability within the field.

Narrative Elicitation as Ethnography: Methodological Insights From the Examination of Children's Perspective Marking in Amdo Tibetan.

This paper employs a case study with Amdo Tibetan children to demonstrate the benefits of narrative elicitation for ethnographic language socialization research in under-studied languages. Primarily by examining spontaneous verbal interaction, existing language socialization research has demonstrated how salient grammatical resources shape children's understanding of cultural belief systems pertaining to sociality and the appropriate display of emotion. However, spontaneous data do not always capture children's full linguistic repertoires and competencies, and may therefore present a partial picture of their mastery over particular grammatical systems. One such area that remains to be studied is how children use interactional cues to build their emerging knowledge of grammatical perspective marking in Tibetan languages. This paper integrates narrative elicitation with ethnographic methods from language socialization to examine how Amdo Tibetan children mark perspective using evidentiality, the grammatically-obligatory encoding of knowledge source, an area not frequently documented in language socialization studies. Language socialization research involved 15-months of participant observation, audio-video recording, and analysis of spontaneous interactions with children aged 1–4. This ethnographic research found that adults' narratives highlighted local theories about the importance of compassion (Tib. snying rje) by using grammatical evidentiality to emphasize characters' direct experiences in the story-world. However, grammatical evidentiality was under-represented in children's spontaneous talk. To provide further insight into children's mastery of evidentiality in this culturally salient communicative genre, I conducted narrative elicitation tasks with seven Amdo Tibetan children, aged 2–7. By framing narrative elicitation tasks as forums for social interaction in family homes, I adapted a method traditionally used in experimentation to complement the study of naturalistic interaction. Interaction analysis of the elicited narratives found that family members positioned young children as novice narrators, leading to dialogic rather than monologic narratives. Young children co-constructed shared perspectives on narrated events, and used evidentiality in conventionalized ways by mirroring the grammatical forms of adults' previous utterances. By adapting narrative elicitation tasks to language socialization's ethnographic methods, this paper models how qualitative researchers can locate patterns in children's experiences of language across complementary settings of data collection, an endeavor that is particularly important to research with child speakers of under-documented languages.

The Predictive Value of Non-Referential Beat Gestures: Early Use in Parent-Child Interactions Predicts Narrative Abilities at 5 Years of Age.

A longitudinal study with 45 children (Hispanic, 13%; non-Hispanic, 87%) investigated whether the early production of non-referential beat and flip gestures, as opposed to referential iconic gestures, in parent-child naturalistic interactions from 14 to 58 months old predicts narrative abilities at age 5. Results revealed that only non-referential beats significantly (p < .01) predicted later narrative productions. The pragmatic functions of the children's speech that accompany these gestures were also analyzed in a representative sample of 18 parent-child dyads, revealing that beats were typically associated with biased assertions or questions. These findings show that the early use of beats predicts narrative abilities later in development, and suggest that this relation is likely due to the pragmatic-structuring function that beats reflect in early discourse.

Resonance as an Applied Predictor of Cross-Cultural Interaction: Constructional Priming in Mandarin and American English Interaction

AbstractIn Dialogic syntax (cf. Du Bois 2014; Tantucci et al. 2018), naturalistic interaction is inherently grounded in resonance, viz. the catalytic activation of affinities across turns (Du Bois and Giora 2014). Resonance occurs dynamically when interlocutors creatively coconstruct utterances that are formally and phonetically similar to the utterance of a prior speaker. In this study, we argue that such similarity can inform the machine learning prediction of linguistic and cross-cultural diversity. We compared two sets of 1,000 exchanges involving (dis)-agreement from the two balanced Callhome corpora of naturalistic interaction in Mandarin Chinese and American English. We found a correlation of overt use of pragmatic markers with resonance, indicating that priming does not occur as an exclusively implicit mechanism (as it is commonly held in the experimental literature e.g. Bock 1986; Bock et al. 2007), but naturalistically underpins dialogic engagement and cooperation among interactants. We fitted a mixed effects linear regression and a hierarchical clustering model to show that resonance occurs formally and functionally in different ways from one language to another. The applied results of this study can lead to a novel turn in AI research of conversational interfaces (McTear et al. 2016; Klopfenstein et al. 2017), as they reveal the fundamental role played cross-linguistically by resonance as a form of engagement of human-to-human interaction and the importance to address this mechanism in machine-to-human communication.

Maternal mediation strategies during interaction with toddlers- a comparison of dyads with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and dyads with typical development (TD)

IntroductionDuring interactions with toddlers, mothers use various mediation strategies to encourage mutual play. Such mediation skills play an important role in the development of toddlers’ communicative skills. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) introduces challenges to this interaction.ObjectivesTo study the use of maternal strategies during interaction with ASD and TD toddlers at early lexical levels.MethodsNine ASD and fifteen TD dyads participated. Toddlers were matched by lexical levels. The mean age in the ASD was 31.5 months and in TD - 17 months. Each dyad was video-recorded three times, during naturalistic interaction. Mothers’ verbal mediation strategies were divided into five main communicative categories.Results1. Exact repetition of toddler’s utterances was similarly used and increased in both groups across the three visits (f (2,44)=3.77, p&lt; 0.05). 2. Significant differences were found between the two groups regarding strategies associated with control of the interaction eg mothers of toddlers with ASD (MASD) made more frequent attempts to redirect their child’s attention (F (1,22)= 74.56, p&lt;0.01). 3. MASD had higher indices of overall talkativeness (F (1,22)= 5.43, p&lt;0.05); use of nonverbal means (F(1,22)= 9,51, p&lt;0.01); simultaneous use of different means of communication (F (1,22)=19.8, p&lt;0.01).ConclusionsOur results highlight that in some respects, maternal mediation strategies reflect the child’s lexical level. However, our main finding is a distinct interaction style expressed in MASD’s elevated use of verbal and nonverbal mediation strategies. This, in hope of maintaining continuous interaction that could not be otherwise achieved due to their toddlers’ difficultiesDisclosureNo significant relationships.

How to Interact with a Fully Autonomous Vehicle: Naturalistic Ways for Drivers to Intervene in the Vehicle System While Performing Non-Driving Related Tasks.

Autonomous vehicle technology increasingly allows drivers to turn their primary attention to secondary tasks (e.g., eating or working). This dramatic behavior change thus requires new input modalities to support driver–vehicle interaction, which must match the driver’s in-vehicle activities and the interaction situation. Prior studies that addressed this question did not consider how acceptance for inputs was affected by the physical and cognitive levels experienced by drivers engaged in Non-driving Related Tasks (NDRTs) or how their acceptance varies according to the interaction situation. This study investigates naturalistic interactions with a fully autonomous vehicle system in different intervention scenarios while drivers perform NDRTs. We presented an online methodology to 360 participants showing four NDRTs with different physical and cognitive engagement levels, and tested the six most common intervention scenarios (24 cases). Participants evaluated our proposed seven natural input interactions for each case: touch, voice, hand gesture, and their combinations. Results show that NDRTs influence the driver’s input interaction more than intervention scenario categories. In contrast, variation of physical load has more influence on input selection than variation of cognitive load. We also present a decision-making model of driver preferences to determine the most natural inputs and help User Experience designers better meet drivers’ needs.

A Crosslinguistic Study of Child Code-Switching within the Noun Phrase: A Usage-Based Perspective

This paper aims to investigate whether language use can account for the differences in code-switching within the article-noun phrase in children exposed to English and German, French and Russian, and English and Polish. It investigates two aspects of language use: equivalence and segmentation. Four children’s speech is derived from corpora of naturalistic interactions recorded between the ages of two and three and used as a source of the children’s article-noun phrases. We demonstrate that children’s CS cannot be fully explained by structural equivalence in each two languages: there is CS in French-Russian although French does, and Russian does not, use articles. We also demonstrate that language pairs which use higher numbers of articles types, and therefore have more segmented article-noun phrases, are also more open to switching. Lastly, we show that longitudinal use of monolingual articles-noun phrases corresponds with the trends in the use of bilingual article-noun phrases. The German-English child only starts to mix English articles once they become more established in monolingual combinations while the French-Russian child ceases to mix French proto-articles with Russian nouns once target articles enter frequent use. These findings are discussed in the context of other studies which report code-switching across different language pairs.

Resonance and engagement through (dis-)agreement: Evidence of persistent constructional priming from Mandarin naturalistic interaction

The recent cognitive and pragmatic turn towards a dialogic syntax (cf. Du Bois, 2014; Tantucci et al., 2018) emphasises the important role played by resonance as catalytic activation of affinities across turns at talk (Du Bois and Giora, 2014). Resonance occurs when interlocutors creatively co-construct utterances that are formally and phonetically similar to the utterance of a prior speaker. This study draws on naturalistic data from the Mandarin Callhome corpus of telephone conversations (McEnery and Xiao, 2008) and focuses on the way resonance intersects with 1000 speech acts of (dis-)agreement. From a mixed effects linear regression model (Baayen and Davidson, 2008) emerged a persistent mechanism of constructional priming in the form of both formal and functional similarity across turn-takings, intersecting with both speech acts of agreement and disagreement. Our results reveal that, contrary to what is often assumed in the literature (e.g. Bock, 1986; Bock et al., 2007), priming does not occur as a merely implicit mechanism, but significantly correlates with increase of explicit engagement, creativity and sentence peripheral pragmatic marking of intersubjectivity (Tantucci, 2020; 2021). The results of this case-study ultimately suggest that structural similarity in naturalistic interaction occurs as a by-product of interactional engagement and creativity, underpinning ad hoc formation of constructional pairings of form and meaning.

Evaluation of smartphone interactions on drivers\u2019 brain function and vehicle control in an immersive simulated environment

Smartphones and other modern technologies have introduced multiple new forms of distraction that color the modern driving experience. While many smartphone functions aim to improve driving by providing the driver with real-time navigation and traffic updates, others, such as texting, are not compatible with driving and are often the cause of accidents. Because both functions elicit driver attention, an outstanding question is the degree to which drivers’ naturalistic interactions with navigation and texting applications differ in regard to brain and behavioral indices of distracted driving. Here, we employed functional near-infrared spectroscopy to examine the cortical activity that occurs under parametrically increasing levels of smartphone distraction during naturalistic driving. Our results highlight a significant increase in bilateral prefrontal and parietal cortical activity that occurs in response to increasingly greater levels of smartphone distraction that, in turn, predicts changes in common indices of vehicle control.

Pragmatic Profiles of Toddlers With Autism Spectrum Disorder at the Onset of Speech.

Using speech to communicate pragmatic functions is challenging among individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Given the role language plays in developing everyday skills, we traced the unique pragmatic profile of early words, seeking comparison to typically developing (TD) toddlers at similar lexical stages. Twenty-four mother-toddler dyads participated (9 ASD and 15 TD). Dyads were video recorded when toddlers reached a productive lexicon of 40–70 words. These recordings were captured three times during naturalistic interaction and at two consecutive visits with a 2-month interval. Seven thousand three hundred seventy-six productions were analyzed and classified into four communicative intentions (Declaratives, Requests, Objections, and Non-Communicative speech). ASD toddlers were delayed in the emergence of words compared to TD toddlers, with a greater within-group variability (median 28 months, IQR 24.5–35, median 17 months, IQR 17–18, respectively, p < 0.001). In both groups, the most common communicative intention was Declarative. However, the percentage of Declaratives was higher among TD toddlers across visits compared to ASD toddlers. In both groups, most productions were directed toward the communicative partner, but ASD toddlers used Non-Communicative speech more often than TD peers. Non-Communicative speech gradually decreased over time. We conclude that while TD toddlers begin to talk with an already-established knowledge of the main communicative functions of words, ASD toddlers seem to have only a partial understanding and gradually improve communicative use as they expand their lexicon. These findings bear theoretical and practical implications for early intervention in ASD. We suggest that communicative profiles are affected by individual characteristics and by the interaction style.

Interpersonal Neural Synchrony During Father-Child Problem Solving: An fNIRS Hyperscanning Study.

Interpersonal neural synchrony (INS) has been previously evidenced in mother–child interactions, yet findings concerning father–child interaction are wanting. The current experiment examined whether fathers and their 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children (N = 66) synchronize their brain activity during a naturalistic interaction, and addressed paternal and child factors related to INS. Compared to individual problem solving and rest, father–child dyads showed increased INS in bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left temporo‐parietal junction during cooperative problem solving. Furthermore, the father’s attitude toward his role as a parent was positively related to INS during the cooperation condition. These results highlight the implication of the father’s attitude to parenting in INS processes for the first time.