Detecting joint attention events in mother-infant dyads: Sharing looks cannot be reliably identified by naïve third-party observers

Abstract

Joint attention, or sharing attention with another individual about an object or event, is a critical behaviour that emerges in pre-linguistic infants and predicts later language abilities. Given its importance, it is perhaps surprising that there is no consensus on how to measure joint attention in prelinguistic infants. A rigorous definition proposed by Siposova & Carpenter (2019) requires the infant and partner to gaze alternate between an object and each other (coordination of attention) and exchange communicative signals (explicit acknowledgement of jointly sharing attention). However, Hobson and Hobson (2007) proposed that the quality of gaze between individuals is, in itself, a sufficient communicative signal that demonstrates sharing of attention. They proposed that observers can reliably distinguish “sharing”, “checking”, and “orienting” looks, but the empirical basis for this claim is limited as their study focussed on two raters examining looks from 11-year-old children. Here, we analysed categorisations made by 32 naïve raters of 60 infant looks to their mothers, to examine whether they could be reliably distinguished according to Hobson and Hobson’s definitions. Raters had overall low agreement and only in 3 out of 26 cases did a significant majority of the raters agree with the judgement of the mother who had received the look. For the looks that raters did agree on at above chance levels, look duration and the overall communication rate of the mother were identified as cues that raters may have relied upon. In our experiment, naïve third party observers could not reliably determine the type of look infants gave to their mothers, which indicates that subjective judgements of types of look should not be used to identify mutual awareness of sharing attention in infants. Instead, we advocate the use of objective behaviour measurement to infer that interactants know they are ‘jointly’ attending to an object or event, and believe this will be a crucial step in understanding the ontogenetic and evolutionary origins of joint attention.

Joint Attention in Human and Chimpanzee Infants in Varied Socio‐Ecological Contexts

“…For example, a proposed marker of knowing together is that the mother and infant exchange sharing looks , a form of communicative looking (Carpenter & Call, 2013; Carpenter & Liebal, 2011; Hobson & Hobson, 2007; Milward & Carpenter, 2018). However, sharing looks are not reliably distinguishable from other types of looks, such as checking looks and monitoring looks , which are not associated with JA (Graham et al, 2021). Hence, the observed behavior accompanying this label is not listed, because it is not an observable behavior.…”

Empirical challenges from the comparative and developmental literature to the Shared Intentionality Theory – a review of alternative data on recursive mind reading, prosociality, imitation and cumulative culture

“…Joint attention is one of the most investigated topics in developmental science, where a broad spectrum of definitions and behavioural markers have been proposed (for recent overviews see Bard et al, 2021 ; Graham et al, 2021 ), all having in common the core of triadic connectedness , i.e., engaging with one or more social partners about a shared topic (e.g., Bard et al, 2021 ). In the field of comparative cognition, research on joint attention is dominated by the SITh perspective, where joint attention is theorised as the ability to purposefully coordinate attention with another individual with the cooperative motivation of sharing focus of attention and, thus, implicitly knowledge.…”

“…While it may be highly frequent in WEIRD samples (i.e., samples from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic cultures), the same cannot be said by other socio-ecological settings. Second, naïve WEIRD observers cannot reliably distinguish looks with a ‘sharing’ function from looks with requestive functions in the context of (mother-infant) interaction from their own culture ( Graham et al, 2021 ). Third, episodes of triadic connectedness may be accompanied by positive affect in both wild and captive chimpanzees at levels that are comparable to those found in human infants from certain socio-cultural groups ( Bard et al, 2021 ).…”