Joint Attention without Gaze Following: Human Infants and Their Parents Coordinate Visual Attention to Objects through Eye-Hand Coordination

The coordination of visual attention among social partners is central to many components of human behavior and human development. Previous research has focused on one pathway to the coordination of looking behavior by social partners, gaze following. The extant evidence shows that even very young infants follow the direction of another's gaze but they do so only in highly constrained spatial contexts because gaze direction is not a spatially precise cue as to the visual target and not easily used in spatially complex social interactions. Our findings, derived from the moment-to-moment tracking of eye gaze of one-year-olds and their parents as they actively played with toys, provide evidence for an alternative pathway, through the coordination of hands and eyes in goal-directed action. In goal-directed actions, the hands and eyes of the actor are tightly coordinated both temporally and spatially, and thus, in contexts including manual engagement with objects, hand movements and eye movements provide redundant information about where the eyes are looking. Our findings show that one-year-olds rarely look to the parent's face and eyes in these contexts but rather infants and parents coordinate looking behavior without gaze following by attending to objects held by the self or the social partner. This pathway, through eye-hand coupling, leads to coordinated joint switches in visual attention and to an overall high rate of looking at the same object at the same time, and may be the dominant pathway through which physically active toddlers align their looking behavior with a social partner.

[1]  A. King,et al.  Settling nature and nurture into an ontogenetic niche. , 1987, Developmental psychobiology.

[2]  S. Baron-Cohen.  How to build a baby that can read minds: Cognitive mechanisms in mindreading. , 1994 .

[3]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Gaze detection and the cortical processing of faces: Evidence from infants and adults , 1995 .

[4]  Rajesh P. N. Rao,et al.  Embodiment is the foundation, not a level , 1996, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[5]  Paul D. Allopenna,et al.  Tracking the Time Course of Spoken Word Recognition Using Eye Movements: Evidence for Continuous Mapping Models , 1998 .

[6]  C. Moore,et al.  The origins of joint visual attention in infants. , 1998, Developmental psychology.

[7]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. , 1998, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[8]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Infants' use of gaze direction to cue attention: The importance of perceived motion , 2000 .

[9]  V. Bruce,et al.  Do the eyes have it? Cues to the direction of social attention , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[10]  M. Hayhoe,et al.  The coordination of eye, head, and hand movements in a natural task , 2001, Experimental Brain Research.

[11]  M. Alibali,et al.  Effects of Visibility between Speaker and Listener on Gesture Production: Some Gestures Are Meant to Be Seen , 2001 .

[12]  M. Hayhoe,et al.  In what ways do eye movements contribute to everyday activities? , 2001, Vision Research.

[13]  R. Johansson,et al.  Eye–Hand Coordination in Object Manipulation , 2001, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[14]  K. Shockley,et al.  Mutual interpersonal postural constraints are involved in cooperative conversation. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[15]  Deborah F. Deckner,et al.  Rhythm in Mother‐Infant Interactions , 2003 .

[16]  Robert E. Kraut,et al.  Visual Information as a Conversational Resource in Collaborative Physical Tasks , 2003, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[17]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Gaze Following in Newborns , 2004 .

[18]  H. H. Clark,et al.  Speaking while monitoring addressees for understanding , 2004 .

[19]  Klaus-Peter Hoffmann,et al.  Target selection in eye–hand coordination: Do we reach to where we look or do we look to where we reach? , 2005, Experimental Brain Research.

[20]  A. Meltzoff,et al.  The development of gaze following and its relation to language. , 2005, Developmental science.

[21]  Hye-Won Hong,et al.  How some infant smiles get made , 2005 .

[22]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition , 2005, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[23]  Lisa M. Oakes,et al.  A Longitudinal Investigation of the Development of Attention and Distractibility , 2006 .

[24]  Andrew N. Meltzoff,et al.  10 Eyes Wide Shut: The Importance of Eyes in Infant Gaze Following and Understanding Other Minds , 2006 .

[25]  D. Muir,et al.  Gaze-following : its development and significance , 2007 .

[26]  P. Mundy,et al.  Attention, Joint Attention, and Social Cognition , 2007, Current directions in psychological science.

[27]  Bar-Ilan.  Parent–Infant Synchrony Biological Foundations and Developmental Outcomes , 2007 .

[28]  M. Pickering,et al.  Alignment in dialogue , 2007 .

[29]  Jonathan W. Kelly,et al.  Psychophysics of Perceiving Eye-Gaze and Head Direction with Peripheral Vision: Implications for the Dynamics of Eye-Gaze Behavior , 2008, Perception.

[30]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  What's in View for Toddlers? Using a Head Camera to Study Visual Experience. , 2008, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[31]  Daniel C. Richardson,et al.  Conversation and Coordinative Structures , 2009, Top. Cogn. Sci..

[32]  A. Mastergeorge,et al.  A parallel and distributed‐processing model of joint attention, social cognition and autism , 2009, Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research.

[33]  M. Doherty,et al.  The rapid development of explicit gaze judgment ability at 3 years. , 2009, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[34]  Richard N Aslin,et al.  How Infants View Natural Scenes Gathered From a Head-Mounted Camera , 2009, Optometry and vision science : official publication of the American Academy of Optometry.

[35]  Natalie Sebanz,et al.  Prediction in Joint Action: What, When, and Where , 2009, Top. Cogn. Sci..

[36]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Not your mother's view: the dynamics of toddler visual experience. , 2011, Developmental science.

[37]  Daniel C. Richardson,et al.  The Dynamics of Reference and Shared Visual Attention , 2011, Front. Psychology.

[38]  Dare A. Baldwin,et al.  Infants recognize similar goals across dissimilar actions involving object manipulation , 2011, Cognition.

[39]  Kasey C. Soska,et al.  Head-mounted eye tracking: a new method to describe infant looking. , 2011, Child development.

[40]  Fine-grained sensitivity to vertical differences in triadic gaze is slow to develop , 2012 .

[41]  Daphne Maurer,et al.  The development of fine-grained sensitivity to eye contact after 6 years of age. , 2012, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[42]  D. Maurer,et al.  Gradual improvement in fine-grained sensitivity to triadic gaze after 6 years of age. , 2012, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[43]  Michael C. Frank.  Measuring children's visual access to social information using face detection , 2012, CogSci.

[44]  Janet Wiles,et al.  Conceptual Recurrence Plots: Revealing Patterns in Human Discourse , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[45]  Shimon Ullman,et al.  From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts , 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[46]  L. Carver,et al.  Research review: Social motivation and oxytocin in autism--implications for joint attention development and intervention. , 2013, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.