Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human cognition is shaped by our bodies and actions. The influence of embodiment on cognition is particularly crucial during early development. Recent evidence shows that infants use actions to accomplish cognitive and social tasks that may later be solved internally. In our study, we propose that a sensorimotor mechanism to hand-eye coordination is through a full path from manual action, to visual saliency, and to visual attention. To provide a rigorous test of this pathway, we analyzed multimodal behavioral data collected from parent-infant toy play. We focused on linking infants’ manual actions with visual properties in the infant’s view and attention. Further, we extended our analyses to quantify the effects of manual actions on one’s own visual attention, infant’s actions on parent attention, and parent’s actions on infant attention. Results suggest that both infants’ and parents’ actions create visual saliency of objects to support visual attention and joint attention.