When and where do infants follow gaze?

Abstract

Infants' processing of adult social cues develops late in the first year. Sensitivity before 6 months is limited to nonspecific motion-cuing by lateral eye movements. Results from naturalistic and experimental studies show that learning is sensitive to factors including target location, target salience, gaze-cue salience, and the presence of distractors or non-gaze social cues. Those results are consistent with models in which incremental learning processes gradually learn to predict interesting events in allocentric space, and spatial attention networks learn to integrate predictive cues and memory traces to plan searches in complex environments.

The Developmental Origins of Gaze‐Following in Human Infants

“…Spontaneous GF, where infants follow a model shifting her eyes and head to a visible target, starts to emerge between 3 and 6 months of age. Some studies have claimed to demonstrate GF tendencies already at 3–4 months of life (Butterworth & Jarrett, ; D'Entremont, ; Gredebäck, Fikke et al., 2010; Hoehl, Wahl, Michel, & Striano, ; Perra & Gattis, ; though see Deák, , for criticism of this work). Early GF is not always precise—infants often look at the closest object in the model's gaze direction (Butterworth & Jarrett, )—or specific, because the direction of the head movement prevails in directing infants' attention (Tomasello, Hare, Lehmann, & Call, ).…”

“…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).…”

“…For instance, toys that attract too much attention, such as moving stuffed animals (D'Entremont, ), reduce the tendency to follow a gaze, compared to static targets. When the properties of targets are manipulated contingently to when the child is following the direction of gaze to that object, it is possible to increase the frequency of GF over time (Deák, ; Moore & Corkum, ).…”

“…Each trial often includes an initial period of interaction to attract the infant's attention to the adult's face: It lasts a few seconds (Gredeb€ ack, Theuring, Hauf, & Kenward, 2008) or continues until the infant is engaged (D'Entremont, Hains, & Muir, 1997). The targets are usually a pair of toys on a table (Gredeb€ ack, Fikke, & Melinder, 2010) or posters (Mundy et al, 2007) and monitors (De ak, 2015).…”

Contingencies Between Infants’ Gaze, Vocal, and Manual Actions and Mothers’ Object-Naming: Longitudinal Changes From 4 to 9 Months

“…Six additional participants dropped out of the longitudinal study. An 150 experimenter visited the participants' home each month between 4 and 9 months, and again at 12 months (participants also visited the laboratory to complete various tasks every month; those data are reported elsewhere, e.g., Deák, 2015;Ellis, Gonzalez, & Deák, 2014). Data from the 4, 6, and 9-month home sessions were analyzed for this study.…”