The Developmental Origins of Gaze‐Following in Human Infants

Abstract

During the first year of life, infants develop the capacity to follow the gaze of others. This behavior allows sharing attention and facilitates language acquisition and cognitive development. This article reviews studies that investigated gaze‐following before 12 months of age in typically developing infants and discusses current theoretical perspectives on early GF. Recent research has revealed that early GF is highly dependent on situational constraints and individual characteristics, but theories that describe the underlying mechanisms have partly failed to consider this complexity. We propose a novel framework termed the perceptual narrowing account of GF that may have the potential to integrate existing theoretical accounts.

Social interaction targets enhance 13‐month‐old infants' associative learning

“…Therefore, the logic of our study design was reversed (i.e., non‐social stimulus cueing a social target) compared to previous studies investigating how infants use other people as social cue aiding them in detecting and learning about relevant content in their environment (e.g., Tummeltshammer et al, 2013; Wu et al, 2011). In direct interactions with others, communicative signals such as direct gaze increase infants’ ability to follow referential cues (Del Bianco et al, 2019; Senju & Csibra, 2008), support infants’ learning from other novel attention cues (Wu et al, 2014), and facilitate their encoding of cued target objects (Michel et al, 2019; Parise et al, 2008). Moreover, joint attentional engagement with others facilitates 9‐month‐olds’ object processing (Cleveland & Striano, 2007), as well as 18‐month‐olds’ action imitation (Nielsen, 2006) and word learning (Hirotani et al, 2009).…”

Altercentric cognition: how others influence our cognitive processing

“…Indeed, there are other examples of dedicated social systems that are overextended to a broader category of similar stimuli [135]. From early in life, infants exhibit many of the effects characteristic of altercentric perception, including gaze cueing [136,137], gaze following [138][139][140], enhanced memory and preference for the targets of others' attention [71,72,141,142] and action [74,143], behavioral mimicry [144], and altered expectations about the presence of objects if someone else has experienced that object's presence [61].…”

Williams syndrome: Reduced attention to other’s eyes in a hypersocial phenotype

“…The eye region conveys crucial information about other's mental states and their intentions regarding the environment. However, decoding this information requires the ability to flexibly shift one's attention between others' eyes and the surroundings [24,60].…”