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While previous studies highlight the role that children’s interest in natural categories predict their learning of new label-object associations in these categories, the long-term implications of such a relationship – the extent to which children’s interest shape lexical development – remain unclear. The current study examines whether children’s interests in different natural object categories predict their subsequent interest and the number of words children know in those categories six months later. Using data from sixty-seven children tested at eighteen and twenty-four months of age, we found that parents’ estimates of interest in natural object categories at 18-months predicted their reports of their child’s interests at 24-months. Parent interest reports at 18-months also predicted the number of words that children are reported to know in that category at 24-months. Taken together, this study documents the longitudinal relationship between children’s interests, parents’ awareness of their children’s interests and later vocabulary development.

Studies of social cognition examine how organisms process and act on the presence, intentions, actions, and behavioural outcomes of others in social contexts. Many real-life social interactions unfold during direct face-to-face contact and rely on immediate, time-continuous feedback about mutual behaviour and changes in the shared environment. Yet, essential aspects of these naturalistic conditions are often lacking in experimental laboratory settings for direct dyadic interactions, i.e., interactions between two people. Here, we describe a novel experimental setting, the Dyadic Interaction Platform (DIP), designed to investigate the behavioural and neural mechanisms of real-time social interactions. Based on a transparent, touch-sensitive, bi-directional visual display, this design allows two participants to observe visual stimuli and each other simultaneously, allowing face-to-face interaction in a shared vertical workspace. Different implementations of the DIP facilitate interactions between two human adults, adults and children, two children, nonhuman primates and in mixed nonhuman-human dyads. The platforms allow for diverse manipulations of interactive contexts and synchronized recordings of both participants’ behavioural, physiological, and neural measures. This approach enables us to integrate economic game theory with time-continuous sensorimotor and perceptual decision-making, social signalling and learning, in an intuitive and socially salient setting that affords precise control over stimuli, task timing, and behavioural responses. We demonstrate the applications and advantages of DIPs in several classes of transparent interactions, ranging from value-based strategic coordination games and dyadic foraging to social cue integration, information seeking, and social learning.