Thirty-seven infants were videotaped in face-to-face play with their mothers at 6, 13, and 26 weeks of age. Analysis proceeded at three levels: (a) The infants' periods of attention toward the mothers significantly overlapped with the mothers' facially expressive behavior. This was increasingly true as the infants grew older: Whereas the total proportion of time looking at the mothers decreased, the time looking at them while they were on did not decrease, (b) The infants' Vocalizations, Smiles, and Mouth Openings clustered into "runs" as described by previous investigators, but at 6 weeks these occurred only when the mothers were on. By 26 weeks of age, the infants' clusters of expression had become autonomous turns in a dialoguelike exchange, (c) Analysis of contingent sequences following the onset of infant attention showed that with infants 6 weeks old, mothers' facial greetings-Nodding, Smiling, and so forth-were only rarely effective in eliciting expressive greetings from the infants, but without the mothers' greetings the infants almost never made such responses. With 13-week-old infants, mothers more easily elicited greetings, and some spontaneous (unelicited) greetings by the infants could also be seen. With 26-week-old infants, the spontaneous greetings had become as frequent as those elicited by the mothers.Cognitive development demands a widening of the infant's horizons beyond the mother's face to include other animate objects and their actions as well as inanimate objects and their motions. Thus, infants' preferences change over the first 6 months so that faces, especially mothers' faces, occupy a declining share of their attention (Schaffer, 1977).Maternal behavior might be expected to change in response to this shift in infant preferences. Mothers might use more varied and exaggerated expressions (Brazelton, Koslowski, & Main, 1974;Stern, Beebe, Jaffe, & Bennett, 1977) to compete against other objects for infants' attention, for the This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation. We are grateful to Richard Nachman for his collaboration in recruiting the sample; to Lynn Barker, Bonnie Umeh, Stephen Muka, and the many coders who contributed their time and vision to the project.Requests for reprints should be sent to Kenneth

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Weekly observations documented developmental changes in mother-infant face-to-face communication between birth and 3 months. Developmental trajectories for each dyad of the duration of infant facial expressions showed a change from the dominance of Simple Attention (without other emotion expressions) to active and emotionally positive forms of attention to the mother toward the end of the 2nd month. The results support an overlapping waves model, rather than a stage model, of developmental change. Sequential analysis found developmental changes from cycling between Gaze Elsewhere and Simple Attention to the Mother's Face in the early weeks to a complex sequence of transitions between Concentrated Attention, Smile, and Cooing Expression nested into sequences of positive communication during the 2nd and 3rd months.

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