The Autonomous Developmental Pathway: The Primacy of Subjective Mental States for Human Behavior and Experience

This review focuses on infants' emerging awareness of mental states and demonstrates how cultural models-consisting of parenting beliefs and practices-interact dynamically with biologically prepared developmental potentialities in shaping infant behavior and development. Contrasting very different cultural contexts, it is suggested that caregivers' visual contingent responsiveness and associated processes are key features of early mother-infant interaction. They (a) are informed by intuitive parenting and culture-specific ethnotheories that, as a consequence, (b) differentially sensitize infants for internal mental states in the 1st year and beyond, and thereby (c) provide mechanisms that specify how culture not only shapes human behavior and experience but also produces culture-specific developmental pathways.