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

Abstract

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.

Infant gaze following depends on communicative signals: An eye‐tracking study of 5‐ to 7‐month‐olds in Vanuatu

“…First, Ni-Vanuatu infants followed the gaze of a person on the computer screen and did so at the age comparable to the youngest Western infants tested using similar procedures (Gredebäck et al, 2008(Gredebäck et al, , 2018Senju & Csibra, 2008;Szufnarowska et al, 2014 Even though Ni-Vanuatu 5-to 7-month-olds in our study spent more time looking at the gazed-at target rather than the distractor (in IDS condition), they did not tend to saccade to the target first. First, Ni-Vanuatu infants followed the gaze of a person on the computer screen and did so at the age comparable to the youngest Western infants tested using similar procedures (Gredebäck et al, 2008(Gredebäck et al, , 2018Senju & Csibra, 2008;Szufnarowska et al, 2014 Even though Ni-Vanuatu 5-to 7-month-olds in our study spent more time looking at the gazed-at target rather than the distractor (in IDS condition), they did not tend to saccade to the target first.…”

“…We used an eye-tracking paradigm (Gredebäck et al, 2008(Gredebäck et al, , 2018Senju & Csibra, 2008;Szufnarowska et al, 2014) to assess gaze-following responses of 5-to 7-months-old infants in the same rural Melanesian small-scale society of Tanna island, in the same general region where Little et al (2016) found face-to-face contact in triadic interactions to be less prevalent than in Western population. We used an eye-tracking paradigm (Gredebäck et al, 2008(Gredebäck et al, , 2018Senju & Csibra, 2008;Szufnarowska et al, 2014) to assess gaze-following responses of 5-to 7-months-old infants in the same rural Melanesian small-scale society of Tanna island, in the same general region where Little et al (2016) found face-to-face contact in triadic interactions to be less prevalent than in Western population.…”

“…We used an eye-tracking paradigm (Gredebäck et al, 2008(Gredebäck et al, , 2018Senju & Csibra, 2008;Szufnarowska et al, 2014) to assess gaze-following responses of 5-to 7-months-old infants in the same rural Melanesian small-scale society of Tanna island, in the same general region where Little et al (2016) found face-to-face contact in triadic interactions to be less prevalent than in Western population. By using eye tracking for the first time to study gaze following in a rural non-Western population of babies, we were adding to a body of closely comparable data from various group of Western infants (Gredebäck et al, 2008(Gredebäck et al, , 2018Senju & Csibra, 2008;Senju et al, 2015;Szufnarowska et al, 2014). By using eye tracking for the first time to study gaze following in a rural non-Western population of babies, we were adding to a body of closely comparable data from various group of Western infants (Gredebäck et al, 2008(Gredebäck et al, , 2018Senju & Csibra, 2008;Senju et al, 2015;Szufnarowska et al, 2014).…”

“…Its exact size and position during the head-turn phase was defined using the Tobii Studio dynamic AOIs functionality.Following prior studies and reports of discrepancies between different measures of gaze following in young infants(Gredebäck et al, 2018), we decided to employ more than one measure. The target-AOI and the distractor-AOIs were static and had identical dimensions.…”

The Developmental Origins of Gaze‐Following in Human Infants

“…The cornerstones of the perceptual narrowing idea are (1) that infants are born with a form of attentional bias that enables a preference for speech sounds and faces that is rather broad (i.e., extended to monkey calls and inverted face‐like displays); and (2) that the initial sensitiveness progressively refines through individualized experiences (e.g., hearing a particular voice and seeing the faces of a specific group of people, and eventually showing a preference/being more skilled at discriminating familiar items than unfamiliar ones). Correspondingly, newborns and young infants show an attentive bias to the direction of gaze expressed as shifts in head and eye‐gaze direction (Farroni, Johnson, & Csibra, ): this initial sensitivity is rather broad for the first months, as a broad range of stimuli and agents implement early GF based on low‐level cues, as highlighted by numerous authors (Deák, ; Farroni, Massaccesi et al., 2004; Gredebäck et al., ; Meltzoff & Brooks, ; Moore et al., ). Progressively, the close interaction with the environment fine tunes neural networks dedicated to GF that might undergo a perceptual narrowing similar to what has been demonstrated for face perception and language (Maurer & Werker, ): Infants become attuned to specific directional cues that they are mostly exposed to and start to ignore non‐specific but salient cues (e.g., eye‐gaze shift versus head motion).…”