TY  - JOUR
AU  - Danilov, Igor Val
AU  - Mihailova, Sandra
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/01/10
TI  - Reflexes and Shared Intentionality in the Origins of Emotions Development: A Scoping Review of Studies on Blinking in Infants
JO  - OBM Neurobiology
SP  - 263
VL  - 09
IS  - 01
AB  - This review aims to explore research on the development of emotions in organisms at the simple reflexes substage of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development. We review the literature on alterations in spontaneous blinking in children under 6 months of age. Then, we extract the data from the selected studies that allow us to examine whether simple reflexes in infants reveal the emotion signature in the altered reflective responses. The significance of this study is that it is the first review to demonstrate that the affective cues cause altered blinking rates at birth. This study hypothesizes that emotion development begins with the association of affective cues with stimuli responsible for activating the neural pathways of simple reflexes—the mechanism of pre-perceptual multimodal integration. Our analysis posits that pre-perceptual multimodal integration can succeed because of shared intentionality in mother-child dyads. This emotion-reflex stimuli conjunction further develops these simple innate neuronal assemblies, shaping the emotional neuronal patterns in statistical learning that are continuously connected with the neuronal pathways of reflexes. The hypothesis of pre-perceptual multimodal integration converges the presumably opposing naturalist and constructivist viewpoints about emotional development.
SN  - 2573-4407
UR  - https://doi.org/10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2501263
DO  - 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2501263
ID  - Danilov2025
ER  -