Infant shifting attention from an adult’s face to an adult’s hand: a precursor of joint attention

Amano, Sachiko; Kezuka, Emiko; Yamamoto, Atsuko

doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2003.06.005

Cited by 45 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Context is useful for detecting hands on the basis of surrounding body parts in ambiguous images. Developmental evidence indicates that infants associate hands with other body parts at approximately 6-9 mo (29) [possibly earlier with faces (30,31)]. We therefore included in the model an existing algorithm that uses surrounding body parts, including the face, for hand detection (32).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Infants' looking is attracted by other people's hands engaged in object manipulation (15,16), and they often shift their gaze from face to a manipulating hand (31). People often look at objects they manipulate, especially slightly before and during initial object contact.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Future studies may resolve whether the sensitivity to mover events is based on some innate capacity or learned early in development, on the basis of an even simpler capacity. The algorithm also uses in an innate manner the spatiotemporal continuity in tracking and an association made by infants between hands and face features (30,31).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

Ullman

Harari

Dorfman

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Early in development, infants learn to solve visual problems that are highly challenging for current computational methods. We present a model that deals with two fundamental problems in which the gap between computational difficulty and infant learning is particularly striking: learning to recognize hands and learning to recognize gaze direction. The model is shown a stream of natural videos and learns without any supervision to detect human hands by appearance and by context, as well as direction of gaze, in complex natural scenes. The algorithm is guided by an empirically motivated innate mechanism-the detection of "mover" events in dynamic images, which are the events of a moving image region causing a stationary region to move or change after contact. Mover events provide an internal teaching signal, which is shown to be more effective than alternative cues and sufficient for the efficient acquisition of hand and gaze representations. The implications go beyond the specific tasks, by showing how domain-specific "proto concepts" can guide the system to acquire meaningful concepts, which are significant to the observer but statistically inconspicuous in the sensory input.A basic question in cognitive development is how we learn to understand the world on the basis of sensory perception and active exploration. Already in their first months of life, infants rapidly learn to recognize complex objects and events in their visual input (1-3). Probabilistic learning models, as well as connectionist and dynamical models, have been developed in recent years as powerful tools for extracting the unobserved causes of sensory signals (4-6). Some of these models can efficiently discover significant statistical regularities in the observed signals, which may be subtle and of high order, and use them to construct world models and guide behavior (7-10). However, even powerful statistical models have inherent difficulties with natural cognitive concepts, which depend not only on statistical regularities in the sensory input but also on their significance and meaning to the observer. For example, in learning to understand actions and goals, an important part is identifying the agents' hands, their configuration, and their interactions with objects (1-3). This is an example in which significant and meaningful features can be nonsalient and highly variable and therefore difficult to learn. Our testing shows that current computational methods for general object detection (11-13) applied to large training data do not result by themselves in automatically learning about hands. In contrast, detecting hands (14), paying attention to what they are doing (15, 16), and using them to make inferences and predictions (1-3, 17) are natural for humans and appear early in development. How is it possible for infants to acquire such concepts in early development?A large body of developmental studies has suggested that the human cognitive system is equipped through evolution with basic innate structures that facilitate the acquisition of meaningf...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

Ullman

Harari

Dorfman

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…In addition to these finger movements performed by one of the stimulus hands, we employed gaze cues to optimally engage observers with the face stimulus (Frischen, Bayliss, & Tipper, 2007 for a review) while directing their attention to one of the stimulus hands (Bayliss, Bartlett, Naughtin, & Kritikos, 2011). Thus, we exploited the fact that hand motion and eye gaze are normally coordinated (Amano, Kezuka, & Yamamoto, 2004;Flanagan & Johansson, 2003;Gowen & Miall, 2006) in order to induce a connection between face and hand stimuli. We expected that the strength of this connection would depend on the efficiency of body-gestalt integration between face and hands; so for a stimulus configuration that could be easily completed into a Embodied Body-Gestalt Completion; Kessler & Miellet 6 body-gestalt, we expected gaze cuing to facilitate the imitative finger responses.…”

Section: The Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceiving conspecifics as integrated body-gestalts is an embodied process.

Kessler

Miellet

2013

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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We investigated the effect of posture congruence on social perception. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that completing "body-gestalts", rather than being a purely visual process, is mediated by congruence in the postures of observer and stimulus.We developed novel stimuli showing a face and two hands that could be combined in various ways to form "body-gestalts" implying different postures. In three experiments we found that imitative finger movements were consistently faster when the observer's posture matched the posture implied by the configuration of face and hands shown on screen, suggesting that participants intuitively used their own body schema to 'fill in the gaps' in the stimuli. Besides shaping how humans perceive others' bodies, embodied body-gestalt (eBG) completion may be an essential social and survival mechanism, e.g. allowing for quick recovery from deceptive actions. It may also partly explain why humans subconsciously align themselves in everyday interactions: This might facilitate optimal co-representation at higher, conscious levels.

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“…At around 9 to 12 months of age, a new set of behavior emerges which can be considered to be triadic interaction, in the sense that it involves a coordination of the child's interactions with both objects and adults, resulting in a referential triangle of child, adult, and the object of which they share attention (Tomasello, 1999). Nadel andTremblay-Leveau (1999) recognized that a personperson-person (P-P-P) system can be observed among infants younger than six months, and suggested that this system may be a precursor of the person-object- Amano, Kezuka, and Yamamoto (2004) proposed another type of triadic interaction system between P-P-P and P-O-P:person-person(object)-person (P-P(0)-P) . They pointed out that this type of interaction can be observed when an adult holds an object in his/her hand [P(0) refers to this situation], and the infant looks at and/or reaches for it.…”

Section: Fundamental Ability To Learn Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploration of Word Learning From Multiple Perspectives

Katoh

2005

The Annual Report of Educational Psychology in Japan

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The phenomenon of children first producing words and then rapidly expanding their vocabulary is fascinating for both researchers and parents. At first glance, acquiring words and meanings may look relatively simple, but recent studies have revealed that word learning is actually a surprisingly complicated and difficult process. It is unlikely that only one approach can satisfactorily explore that process.The problem of word learning must be examined in many different ways from multiple perspectives.The present paper discusses studies of word learning from 5 different perspectives:(1) word learning biases and applications of those biases, (2) actions and pragmatic aspects of input, (3) developmental data and theoretical issues, (4) the fundamental ability to learn words, and (5) devices for word learning studies.The most important recent studies of word learning in Japan from the present author's viewpoint, mainly from international journals, are reviewed, but important domestic publications are also included and discussed.

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Infant shifting attention from an adult’s face to an adult’s hand: a precursor of joint attention

Cited by 45 publications

References 12 publications

From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts

Perceiving conspecifics as integrated body-gestalts is an embodied process.

Exploration of Word Learning From Multiple Perspectives

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