The relationship between infants' interest in feedback of self-performed actions with different latency and their parents' temporally contingent behavior

•We tested the relation between parent behavior and infants' interest in their own actions.•Parents' temporally contingent behavior was analyzed.•Infants' interest in the feedback of their own actions with different latency was examined.•Parents' contingent behavior correlated with infants' interest in real-time feedback.

In this study, we asked whether parental contingent behavior and infants' interest in feedback of self-performed actions with different timing are related. Therefore, we observed parents reacting contingently to their infants' behavior and examined the extent to which the infants were interested in real-time visual feedback of their leg movements and delayed visual feedback of their leg movements. Thirty-two parent-infant dyads were tested. Results revealed that the more often parents reacted contingently to their infants' behavior the more infants were interested in the real-time feedback. We concluded that the pattern of parents' contingent behavior influences their infants' interest in immediate effects displayed in the real-time feedback when they are observing displays of their own behavior that differs in latency.