We propose a computational model of the emergence of gaze following skills in infant-caregiver interactions. The model is based on the idea that infants learn that monitoring their caregiver's direction of gaze allows them to predict the locations of interesting objects or events in their environment (Moore & Corkum, 1994
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.
Research highlights• Infants strongly prefer watching their parents manipulate objects over watching either their parents' face, or static objects, during naturalistic face-to-face play.• Parents playing with infants focus on infants' faces and use object movement to attract infants' attention.
Factors affecting joint visual attention in 12- and 18-month-olds were investigated. In Experiment 1 infants responded to 1 of 3 parental gestures: looking, looking and pointing, or looking, pointing, and verbalizing. Target objects were either identical to or distinctive from distractor objects. Targets were in front of or behind the infant to test G. E. Butterworth's (1991b) hypothesis that 12-month-olds do not follow gaze to objects behind them. Pointing elicited more episodes of joint visual attention than looking alone. Distinctive targets elicited more episodes of joint visual attention than identical targets. Although infants most reliably followed gestures to targets in front of them, even 12-month-olds followed gestures to targets behind them. In Experiment 2 parents were rotated so that the magnitude of their head turns to fixate front and back targets was equivalent. Infants looked more at front than at back targets, but there was also an effect of magnitude of head turn. Infants' relative neglect of back targets is partly due to the "size" of adult's gesture.
Flexible induction is the adaptation of probabilistic inferences to changing problems. Young children's flexibility was tested in a word-learning task. Children 3 to 6 years old were told 3 novel words for each of several novel objects. Children generalized each word to other objects with the same body shape, the same material, or the same part as the first object. Each word was preceded by a different predicate (i.e., "looks like a …," "is made of …," or "has a …") that implies a different attribute (shape, material, or part, respectively). Three-year-olds showed limited use of predicates to infer word meanings, and they used predicates from previous trials to infer the meanings of later words. 4-to 6-year-olds used predicate cues more consistently and made inferences that were implied by the most recent predicate cue. Notably, 3-year-olds performed near ceiling in a control task that eliminated the need to use probabilistic inductive cues (Experiment 3). The results suggest that flexibility develops as a function of (a) sensitivity to between-problem variability and indeterminacy and (b) ability to decontextualize the most recent verbal cue to guide of inductive inferences.The epitome of human reasoning is the ability to solve variable, novel problems while ignoring irrelevant information. This is difficult for adults (Dominowski, JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT, 1(2),
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