Gaze Following Is Not Dependent on Ostensive Cues: A Critical Test of Natural Pedagogy.

The theory of natural pedagogy stipulates that infants follow gaze because they are sensitive to the communicative intent of others. According to this theory, gaze following should be present if, and only if, accompanied by at least one of a set of specific ostensive cues. The current article demonstrates gaze following in a range of contexts, both with and without expressions of communicative intent in a between-subjects design with a large sample of 6-month-old infants (n = 94). Thus, conceptually replicating prior results from Szufnarowska et al. (2014) and falsifying a central pillar of the natural pedagogy theory. The results suggest that there are opportunities to learn from others' gaze independently of their displayed communicative intent.

[1]  Gustaf Gredebäck,et al.  The development of joint visual attention: a longitudinal study of gaze following during interactions with mothers and strangers. , 2010, Developmental science.

[2]  Greg D. Reynolds,et al.  Infant visual attention and object recognition , 2015, Behavioural Brain Research.

[3]  Ben Kenward,et al.  The Microstructure of Infants' Gaze as They View Adult Shifts in Overt Attention , 2008 .

[4]  Navigating pedagogy: Children’s developing capacities for learning from pedagogical interactions , 2016 .

[5]  Chris Moore,et al.  Infant gaze following based on eye direction , 1998 .

[6]  C. Teuscher,et al.  Gaze following: why (not) learn it? , 2006, Developmental science.

[7]  Christine Fawcett,et al.  Pupillary Contagion in Infancy , 2016, Psychological science.

[8]  Katharina J. Rohlfing,et al.  Is ostension any more than attention? , 2014, Scientific Reports.

[9]  Katharina J. Rohlfing,et al.  Which ostensive stimuli can be used for a robot to detect and maintain tutoring situations? , 2009, 2009 3rd International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction and Workshops.

[10]  J. Triesch,et al.  Watch the hands: infants can learn to follow gaze by seeing adults manipulate objects. , 2014, Developmental science.

[11]  Olga Kochukhova,et al.  Preverbal infants anticipate that food will be brought to the mouth: an eye tracking study of manual feeding and flying spoons. , 2010, Child development.

[12]  Jessica S. Horst,et al.  The Right Thing at the Right Time: Why Ostensive Naming Facilitates Word Learning , 2012, Front. Psychology.

[13]  Michael Morales,et al.  Responding to Joint Attention Across the 6- Through 24-Month Age Period and Early Language Acquisition , 2000 .

[14]  Scott P. Johnson,et al.  Eye Tracking in Infancy Research , 2009, Developmental neuropsychology.

[15]  T. Kushnir,et al.  Pedagogical cues encourage toddlers' transmission of recently demonstrated functions to unfamiliar adults. , 2015, Developmental science.

[16]  Moritz M. Daum,et al.  The development of pointing perception in infancy: effects of communicative signals on covert shifts of attention. , 2013, Developmental psychology.

[17]  Gergely Csibra,et al.  Recognizing Communicative Intentions in Infancy , 2010 .

[18]  Ben Kenward,et al.  Saccadic Reaction Times in Infants and Adults: Spatiotemporal Factors, Gender, and Interlaboratory Variation , 2017, Developmental psychology.

[19]  F. Hasselman,et al.  Toddlers' gaze following through attention modulation: intention is in the eye of the beholder. , 2013, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[20]  S. Bölte,et al.  Altered gaze following during live interaction in infants at risk for autism: an eye tracking study , 2016, Molecular Autism.

[21]  M. Tervaniemi,et al.  Infant Directed Speech Enhances Statistical Learning in Newborn Infants: An ERP Study , 2016, PloS one.

[22]  G. Csibra,et al.  Nonverbal communicative signals modulate attention to object properties. , 2014, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[23]  Andrew N Meltzoff,et al.  Connecting the dots from infancy to childhood: a longitudinal study connecting gaze following, language, and explicit theory of mind. , 2015, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[24]  A. Meltzoff,et al.  Factors affecting infants' manual search for occluded objects and the genesis of object permanence. , 2008, Infant behavior & development.

[25]  S. Bölte,et al.  Brief Report: Lack of Processing Bias for the Objects Other People Attend to in 3-Year-Olds with Autism , 2014, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

[26]  A. Neal,et al.  Individual differences in infant attention skills, joint attention, and emotion regulation behaviour , 2005 .

[27]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Understanding the referential nature of looking: Infants’ preference for object-directed gaze , 2008, Cognition.

[28]  A. Gopnik,et al.  Children’s imitation of causal action sequences is influenced by statistical and pedagogical evidence , 2011, Cognition.

[29]  David M. Sobel,et al.  Attention to the mouth and gaze following in infancy predict language development. , 2015, Journal of child language.

[30]  G. Butterworth,et al.  What minds have in common is space : Spatial mechanisms serving joint visual attention in infancy , 1991 .

[31]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Eye contact detection in humans from birth , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[32]  Gustaf Gredebäck,et al.  The TimeStudio Project: An open source scientific workflow system for the behavioral and brain sciences , 2015, Behavior Research Methods.

[33]  G. Csibra,et al.  Gaze Following in Human Infants Depends on Communicative Signals , 2008, Current Biology.

[34]  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.

[35]  T. Hutman,et al.  Atypical Gaze Following in Autism: A Comparison of Three Potential Mechanisms , 2013, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

[36]  Michael C. Frank,et al.  A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility, Best Practices, and Theory-Building. , 2017, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.