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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (3 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2018)
Attention sharing provides an important context for infant learning, but it is not fully understood how infants respond to parents’ isolated or combined actions to shift from nonsharing to attention-sharing states. To investigate this, we recorded unscripted toy-play interactions of infants (3 to 11 months old, N = 35) and mothers at home, and coded attention-related behaviors. These included infants’ and mothers’ visual fixations, and mothers’ attention-directing actions including gaze shifts, pointing gestures, object manipulations, verbalizations, and object sounds. In addition, dyadic attention was continuously classified into one of seven states of shared or nonshared attention. Results showed that mothers usually produced a combination of attention-directing cues within the 7 sec. before infants shifted their attention to match the mother's focus. Mothers’ cue combinations usually included object manipulation and either a gaze shift or a verbalization. Infants seldom looked at mothers’ faces and followed a very small proportion of isolated gaze shifts or pointing gestures. However, infants frequently shifted attention to watch mothers manipulate objects. The results indicate that during toy play, combinations of maternal attention-specifying actions selectively elicit infants’ attention following.
    Cover page: What Leads To Shared Attention? Maternal Cues and Infant Responses During Object Play
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2013)
      Cover page: Learning to share: The emergence of joint attention in human infancy.Creative Commons 'BY-NC-ND' version 4.0 license
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2014)

      Infants gradually learn to share attention, but it is unknown how they acquire skills such as gaze-following. Deák and Triesch (2006) suggest that gaze-following could be acquired if infants learn that adults’ gaze direction is likely to be aligned with interesting sights. This hypothesis stipulates that adults tend to look at things that infants find interesting, and that infants could learn by noticing this tendency. We tested the plausibility of this hypothesis through video-based micro-behavioral analysis of naturalistic parent–infant play. The results revealed that 3- to 11-month-old infants strongly preferred watching caregivers handle objects. In addition, when caregivers looked away from their infant they tended to look at their own object-handling. Finally, when infants looked toward the caregiver while she was looking at her own hands, the infant’s next eye movement was often toward the caregiver’s object-handling. In this way infants receive adequate naturalistic input to learn associations between their parent’s gaze direction and the locations of interesting sights.

        Cover page: Watch the hands: infants can learn to follow gaze by seeing adults manipulate objects
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