Dynamic Representational Synchrony through Collective Predictive Coding: A Computational Model of Parent-Infant Homeostatic Co-Regulation

Abstract

Inter-brain synchrony (IBS) observed in real-time dyadic interactions, including parent-infant exchanges, suggests that two agents can align their internal representations through interaction. Yet computational accounts of how such alignment can arise between agents that have only local sensory access and asymmetric internal knowledge remain underdeveloped. We propose a constructive model of parent-infant homeostatic co-regulation that integrates a POMDP formulation of active interoceptive inference with the Metropolis-Hastings Naming Game (MHNG) derived from the Collective Predictive Coding (CPC) hypothesis. In our model, the parent and infant agents agree on homeostatic regulatory actions for the infant's visceral state through a shared communicative variable generated by a locally computable Metropolis-Hastings probability. The parent observes the infant through body-generated exteroceptive cues, whereas the infant directly senses its own visceral state through interoception. This difference in access modality is implemented as asymmetric generative-model knowledge: the parent knows how actions transform visceral states but must learn what the infant's bodily cues indicate, whereas the infant perceives its visceral state directly but must learn how actions affect it. We quantify the degree of representational alignment using the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the two agents' latent representations. Notably, this synchrony emerged far earlier than the generative-model convergence and was maintained despite heterogeneous generative-model knowledge, indicating that it does not require fully shared world models. These findings support CPC as a candidate computational framework for explaining how dynamic representational synchrony relevant to IBS can emerge through local interactions.