How Infants Learn to Tell Close Relationships From Casual Ones

Long before a child can name a best friend or describe what love feels like, the brain appears to be quietly building the mental machinery that will one day make such judgments possible. A new perspective article published in Trends in Psychology by Petra Winnette of the Center for Neuropsychiatric Research of Traumatic Stress at Charles University in Prague proposes that the fundamental human distinction between close and casual relationships is not learned in childhood or adolescence, but is encoded far earlier, in the first months of life, as a highly abstract memory schema formed through repeated interactions with primary caregivers. The framework, which integrates cognitive social neuroscience, developmental psychology, and memory research, offers a unifying account of how relational categorization emerges and why it shapes our social lives for decades afterward.

The starting point for the argument is a striking feature of human social life. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s work on social networks shows that although people typically maintain 150 to 250 social ties, only three to five of these are genuinely close relationships, usually involving parents, children, partners, and best friends. Close relationships are qualitatively different from casual ones: they are enduring, emotionally significant bonds marked by mutual interdependence, frequent interaction, and deep cognitive and affective involvement of both self and other. Casual or instrumental ties, by contrast, are relatively transient, organized around specific goals or resources, and involve minimal emotional investment. Recent functional neuroimaging work by Roseman, Dunbar, and Arzy suggests that these two categories are handled by partly distinct neural circuitry. Thinking about close others activates the temporoparietal junction, precuneus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and default mode network A, while casual ties recruit the medial temporal lobe, retrosplenial cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and default mode network C. Remarkably, brain responses to close relationships correlated strongly with responses to small spaces such as a room or household, whereas casual ties tracked with large spaces like a town or region. Reaction times were also significantly shorter when people thought about their close people, suggesting that close relationships are processed more rapidly, with stronger self-related and intuitive components.

Yet despite this growing neuroscientific picture, Winnette identifies a conceptual gap. Attachment theory, the dominant framework for early social development, explains how infants form bonds with caregivers and build internal working models, cognitive-affective representations of self and others that guide expectations, emotion regulation, and behavior in later relationships. Object relations theory similarly proposes that early interactions are internalized as enduring mental representations that serve as road maps for social life. But neither tradition, the article argues, explicitly explains how individuals come to recognize and classify relationships as belonging to qualitatively different types, that is, how we learn that some relationships are close and others are not. The neuroscience tells us that close and casual ties involve different cognitive processes, but the developmental mechanism by which these categories are acquired has remained insufficiently understood.

The proposed solution draws on a concept from memory research: the memory schema. As defined by Ghosh and Gilboa, a memory schema is a multidimensional, dynamic body of knowledge that emerges from integrating multiple interrelated experiences. Schemas encode commonalities across episodes, enabling abstraction and generalization, while discarding the details of individual events. They are inherently associative, linking perceptual, conceptual, and contextual elements, and they can incorporate affective components so that emotions become embedded within their structure. The perspective proposes that repeated, emotionally salient interactions with primary caregivers give rise not only to specific attachment bonds but also to a generalized, domain-general memory schema of relational closeness. Through countless interactions, the infant’s memory system abstracts recurring relational features such as predictability, proximity, emotional attunement, and interactional frequency, forming a multidimensional, affectively laden template of what constitutes a close versus a casual relationship.

Crucially, the developmental timing fits what memory science now knows about infancy. Declarative episodic memory, our ability to remember specific events in rich detail, is limited early in life and improves markedly around age seven or eight, which is why adults experience infantile amnesia. Yet infants are prodigious learners of generalized knowledge. Statistical learning, the ability to detect regularities in repetitive experience, is intensely active from the earliest months, and an fMRI study by Ellis and colleagues showed that the anterior hippocampus supports statistical learning from as early as three months of age, before the trisynaptic pathway supporting episodic memory matures. Alberini and Travaglia’s model of memory development proposes that hippocampal learning proceeds through a cascade of critical periods, with generalized semantic and statistical learning preceding detailed episodic learning. In other words, the infant brain is built first to extract categories and regularities, and only later to encode specific episodes. This hierarchical principle, Winnette argues, is exactly what would be needed to construct a categorical representation of relational closeness before the child can remember any particular close moment.

The building blocks of this schema are laid down through several well-documented learning processes. Newborns arrive with implicit memories of their biological mother’s sounds, smells, and tastes acquired in utero, and can distinguish her face from a stranger’s within hours of birth. Perceptual constancy allows infants to recognize the caregiver across changing conditions, and perceptual learning then builds increasingly nuanced knowledge on top of that stable foundation. Perceptual narrowing progressively tunes infants to the faces and voices of familiar people. Memory generalization, present from birth, preserves the core meaning of experiences while their details fade, and emotionally intense experiences are preferentially retained. Nim Tottenham’s research on early adversity further suggests that medial prefrontal-subcortical circuitry encodes affective memory schemas of early caregiving, so that even without episodic memories of traumatic events, implicit schemas of hostility or coldness can shape relationships for a lifetime. The same mechanism, applied to warm and responsive care, would encode a positive template of closeness.

Interactive social learning in infancy provides the raw material. Imitation, documented in newborns by Meltzoff and Moore and debated ever since, may function not merely as a learning tool for specific behaviors but as a process through which infants extract regularities across interactions, distinguishing familiar, stable partners from less predictable others. Parent-infant synchrony, studied extensively by Ruth Feldman, involves shared affective states, temporal coordination, and biological tuning, providing a structured, emotionally rich context in which infants encode core features of closeness such as mutual regulation and shared affect. Intersubjectivity, the capacity to share another person’s lived experience described by Daniel Stern and Colwyn Trevarthen, appears to be an innate program active within the first months of life, with infant-caregiver face-to-face exchanges statistically resembling informal adult conversation. Meanwhile, the medial prefrontal cortex, though anatomically immature, is partially active in infancy and responds preferentially to self-relevant social stimuli, including a mother’s smile, infant-directed speech, and affectionate touch, which has been shown to speed face recognition in four-month-olds.

The proposed framework thus complements rather than replaces attachment theory. Where attachment theory and object relations theory explain how individuals expect particular relationships to function, the new account explains how individuals come to organize and classify relationships more broadly, introducing cognitive-neuroscientific mechanisms of abstraction and generalization that link early repetitive interactions to the formation of relational categories. The author is careful to acknowledge limitations: the framework is conceptual rather than empirically tested, the construct of a closeness schema has not yet been operationalized, and the model may underrepresent individual differences in temperament and genetics, later-life plasticity, and the possibility that closeness exists on a continuum rather than as a categorical boundary. Future research directions include longitudinal designs, neurocognitive measures that test whether close and casual relationship stimuli differentially engage memory and affect systems, and cross-cultural studies of whether the close-casual distinction is universal.

The stakes of the proposal are considerable. Close relationships are essential for emotional well-being, and their absence or disruption is a primary determinant of loneliness, defined as a perceived discrepancy between desired and actual relational closeness. Loneliness and social isolation rank among the major issues in mental health, and research links early social learning to later relationship quality, loneliness, and social isolation. If Winnette is right, the capacity for intimacy rests on a foundation laid in the earliest weeks and months of life, when an infant’s memory system quietly distills thousands of small interactions into a single, powerful idea: that with this person, interactions are frequent, predictable, emotionally intense, and reliably the same when they return. That abstracted sense of closeness, encoded long before conscious recollection begins, may then serve as the cognitive-affective template on which every subsequent close relationship, from childhood friendships to adult partnerships, is built.

Subject of Research: The developmental emergence of a memory schema of relational closeness in infancy

Article Title: Perspective: Early Development of Memory Schema of Closeness in Social Relationships

Article References: Winnette, P. (2026). Perspective: Early Development of Memory Schema of Closeness in Social Relationships. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00538-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00538-3

Keywords: memory schema, relational closeness, attachment theory, infancy, social neuroscience, statistical learning, internal working models, primary caregiver, perceptual narrowing, imitation, intersubjectivity, loneliness