Infants’ Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age

Thiele, Maleen; Hepach, Robert; Michel, C.; Haun, Daniel B. M.

doi:10.1111/cdev.13636

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 71 publications

(99 reference statements)

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“…Ethical approval for the design and procedure of the study “Observing others’ joint attention increases 9-month-old infants’ object encoding” was provided by the Child Subjects Committee of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (no protocol number). We preregistered the hypotheses, methods, procedures, and the data analysis plan for this experiment on the Open Science Framework (OSF; https://osf.io/yfegm/ [Thiele et al, 2020a]). Video examples, eye tracking raw data, and R scripts for preprocessing and analyzing the data are available at the same link on the OSF.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Observing others’ joint attention increases 9-month-old infants’ object encoding.

Thiele

Hepach

Michel

et al. 2021

Developmental Psychology

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In direct interactions with others, 9-month-old infants' learning about objects is facilitated when the interaction partner addresses the infant through eye contact before looking toward an object. In this study we investigated whether similar factors promote infants' observational learning from third-party interactions. In Experiment 1, 9-month-old typically developing infants from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds from urban Germany (N = 32, 13 female) were presented with four types of videos showing one object and two adults. The scenarios varied systematically regarding the eye contact between the adults (eye contact or no eye contact), and the adults' object-directed gaze (looking toward or away from the object). To assess infants' encoding performance we measured their looking times when seeing the familiarized object subsequently next to a novel object, interpreting an enhanced novelty preference as reversely indicating greater encoding of the familiarized object. Infants showed an increased novelty preference, but only after observing a joint attentional setting during which two adults attended to the familiarized object together (following eye contact). In Experiment 2, we found an identical pattern of results in a matched first-party design in which 9-month-old infants (N = 32, 16 female) were directly addressed by one single adult on screen. Infants' encoding was only enhanced when the adult made eye contact with the infant before looking at an object. Together, this suggests that the capacity to learn through observing others' interactions emerges already in the first postnatal year, and that it may depend on similar factors as infants' learning through direct social engagement.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Observing others’ joint attention increases 9-month-old infants’ object encoding.

Thiele

Hepach

Michel

et al. 2021

Developmental Psychology

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“…Jones and Klin (34) observed that 2-to 6-month-old male infant siblings who went on to receive the diagnosis of ASD did not display evidence of less looking to faces and eyes at the end of the neonatal period of development (see Figure 3). One of the issues that may have impacted the observations of Jones and Klin (34) is the bias for attention to faces may be weak or highly variable in the first months of life in typical development, but become more evident or consistent among 6-to 12-month-olds (86)(87)(88). Hence, the typical pattern of social attention development in neonates may not be sufficiently robust or reliable to readily detect contrasting atypical patterns of development.…”

Section: The Timing Of the Development Of Social Orienting And Joint Attention Symptomsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Bidirectional Social-Cognitive Mechanisms of the Social-Attention Symptoms of Autism

Mundy

Bullen

2022

Front. Psychiatry

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Differences in social attention development begin to be apparent in the 6th to 12th month of development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and theoretically reflect important elements of its neurodevelopmental endophenotype. This paper examines alternative conceptual views of these early social attention symptoms and hypotheses about the mechanisms involved in their development. One model emphasizes mechanism involved in the spontaneous allocation of attention to faces, or social orienting. Alternatively, another model emphasizes mechanisms involved in the coordination of attention with other people, or joint attention, and the socially bi-directional nature of its development. This model raises the possibility that atypical responses of children to the attention or the gaze of a social partner directed toward themselves may be as important in the development of social attention symptoms as differences in the development of social orienting. Another model holds that symptoms of social attention may be important to early development, but may not impact older individuals with ASD. The alterative model is that the social attention symptoms in infancy (social orienting and joint attention), and social cognitive symptoms in childhood and adulthood share common neurodevelopmental substrates. Therefore, differences in early social attention and later social cognition constitute a developmentally continuous axis of symptom presentation in ASD. However, symptoms in older individuals may be best measured with in vivo measures of efficiency of social attention and social cognition in social interactions rather than the accuracy of response on analog tests used in measures with younger children. Finally, a third model suggests that the social attention symptoms may not truly be a symptom of ASD. Rather, they may be best conceptualized as stemming from differences domain general attention and motivation mechanisms. The alternative argued for here that infant social attention symptoms meet all the criteria of a unique dimension of the phenotype of ASD and the bi-directional phenomena involved in social attention cannot be fully explained in terms of domain general aspects of attention development.

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“…Computational models of gaze following development have successfully simulated the social reinforcement learning processes, suggesting the existence of a social motivation factor (Carlson & Triesch, 2004;Ishikawa et al, 2020). Similarly, a recent study in human infants reported that infants show increasing attentiveness to others' social interactions from 7-to 14-month of age, which develop in parallel to improvements in their joint attention during parent-infant free-play interactions (Thiele et al, 2021). Likewise, our eye tracking measures of social orienting and social reward processing appear to be indicators of a latent social motivation factor that predicts the development of gaze following.…”

Section: Early Infant Social Motivation Predicts Later Gaze Followingmentioning

confidence: 88%

Social motivation predicts gaze following between 6 and 14 months

Zeng,

Leung,

Maylott

et al. 2023

Infancy

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Infants vary in their ability to follow others' gazes, but it is unclear how these individual differences emerge. We tested whether social motivation levels in early infancy predict later gaze following skills. We longitudinally tracked infants' (N = 82) gazes and pupil dilation while they observed videos of a woman looking into the camera simulating eye contact (i.e., mutual gaze) and then gazing toward one of two objects, at 2, 4, 6, 8, and 14 months of age. To improve measurement validity, we used confirmatory factor analysis to combine multiple observed measures to index the underlying constructs of social motivation and gaze following. Infants' social motivation-indexed by their speed of social orienting, duration of mutual gaze, and degree of pupil dilation during mutual gaze-was developmentally stable and positively predicted the development of gaze following-indexed by their proportion of time looking to the target object, first object look difference scores, and first face-to-object saccade difference scores-from 6 to 14 months of age. These findings suggest that infants' social motivation likely plays a role in the development of gaze following and highlight the use of a multi-measure

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Infants’ Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age

Cited by 8 publications

References 71 publications

Observing others’ joint attention increases 9-month-old infants’ object encoding.

Observing others’ joint attention increases 9-month-old infants’ object encoding.

The Bidirectional Social-Cognitive Mechanisms of the Social-Attention Symptoms of Autism

Social motivation predicts gaze following between 6 and 14 months

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