Microanalysis is a method for recording and coding interactional behavior. It has been often compared to a social microscope, for its power in detailing the second-by-second dynamics of social interaction. Microanalysis has deep multidisciplinary foundations, that privilege the description of interactions as they naturally occur, with the purpose of understanding the relations between multiple and simultaneous streams of behaviors. In developmental science, microanalysis has uncovered structural and temporal elements in mother-infant interactions, improving our understanding of the effects of mother-infant interpersonal adaptation in the infant’s cognitive and social-emotional development.

Detailed manual coding is time intensive and resource demanding, imposing restrictions to sample size, and the ability to analyze multiple behavioral modalities. Moreover, recent increases in the density of multivariate data require different tools. We review present-day techniques that tackle those challenges: (1) sensing techniques for motion tracking and physiological recording; (2) exploratory techniques for detecting patterns from high-density data; and (3) inferential and modeling techniques for understanding contingencies between interactional time series.

Two illustrations, from recent developmental research, reveal the power of bringing new lenses to our social microscope: (1) egocentric vision, the use of head mounted cameras and eye-trackers in capturing the infant’s first-person perspective of a social exchange; and (2) daily activity sensing, wearable multimodal sensing that brought mother-infant interaction research to the environments where it naturally unfolds.

微量分析是一种记录和编码交互行为的方法。它经常被比作社交显微镜，因为它能够详细描述社交互动的每时每刻动态。微观分析具有深厚的多学科基础，优先描述自然发生的相互作用，目的是理解多个和同时发生的行为流之间的关系。在发展科学中，微观分析揭示了母婴互动中的结构和时间因素，提高了我们对母婴人际适应对婴儿认知和社会情感发展影响的理解。

详细的手动编码需要大量时间和资源，对样本大小和分析多种行为模式的能力施加限制。此外，最近多变量数据密度的增加需要不同的工具。我们回顾了应对这些挑战的当今技术：（1）用于运动跟踪和生理记录的传感技术；(2) 从高密度数据中检测模式的探索性技术；(3) 用于理解交互时间序列之间的偶然性的推理和建模技术。

最近的发展研究中的两个插图揭示了为我们的社会显微镜带来新镜头的力量：（1）以自我为中心的视觉，使用头戴式摄像机和眼动仪捕捉婴儿对社会交流的第一人称视角；(2) 日常活动传感，可穿戴多模态传感，将母婴互动研究带到自然展开的环境中。