Ellen Dissanayake (Independent Scholar, Seattle, Washington)
Since the early 1970s, an increasing stream of studies by developmental psychologists has shown remarkably precocious perceptual and cognitive abilities in very young infants, abilities that appear to have evolved expressly for social interaction. For example, infants are born ready to respond to human faces and voices more than to any other sight or sound. By six weeks of age, they spontaneously engage in reciprocal, coordinated, communicative interactions with a sympathetic adult partner.In these interchanges (called by psychologists "early interactions" and in common parlance "baby talk"), infants do not just react reflexively, but with their own positive and negative responses they actively influence the signals that others present to them. Adults perform the peculiarly stereotyped, repetitive, and exaggerated vocal utterances, head movements, and facial expressions of baby talk -- presented as multimodal, temporally-organized "packages" of sensory stimuli -- because these are what babies universally respond to most noticeably and delightedly. The close attunements achieved in early interactions promote attachment between the pair and confer a number of developmental benefits to babies, contributing to such skills as biobehavioral self-regulation, language acquisition, social competence, and to cognitive ("narrative") abilities to recognize agency, object, goal, and instrumentality.
The features and operations used by adults universally and spontaneously (or unconsciously) to create and direct the infant's emotional response can justifiably be termed aesthetic (or "protoaesthetic") in that artists use, and develop, these same features and operations in both space and time for similar purposes of attracting attention and provoking and manipulating emotional response. These include the formalizations (or stereotypy), repetitions, exaggerations, and elaborations of the visual, vocal, and kinesic components of babytalk interactions; their organization into theme and variations; the use of structural features such as framing, phrasing, pacing, and closure; the choice of an emotional "tone"; the development of pretense; and the manipulation of anticipation or expectation. The existence of sensitivities to such features in the first months of life suggests that humans are born with natural (innate, universal) predispositions for aesthetic engagement, from which cultures and individuals can create their myriad elaborated forms of artistic expression.