A framework for infants' emerging affect-cognition interface

This paper advocates integrating affect neuroscience network and appraisal theories of emotion in a framework for the purpose of better describing and studying the emerging links between infant affect processes and cognition. Panskepp's empirical and theoretical work on affect networks (1998) and Scherer and Moore's working model of affect processing (2019) provide the theoretical underpinnings of the proposed developmental interface of affect and cognition. The framework describes early affect-cognitive links as continuously unfolding processes arising from everyday commerce with people and objects that are functional by 7 months. It assumes that affect processing accompanies all infant-relevant-environment transactions, but that the experiences infants have and the actions of which they are capable, are constrained at each age by their motor development and appraisal capacities. It hypothesizes that infant brains appraise recurring contexts, remember predictions including the affect and the appraisals correlated with them, and generalize across contexts. By 9 months, appraisals of control, intention, social cognition, and self-relevance become increasingly important in determining affect experience. By two years, self-referential processes influence affect and appraisal.