Joint attention without gaze following: human infants and their parents coordinate visual attention to objects through eye-hand coordination

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 8; no. 11; p. e79659
• Main Authors: Yu, Chen, Smith, Linda B
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 13.11.2013; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Attention; Autism; Babies; Behavior; Brain research; Cameras; Cognition & reasoning; Eye; Eye (anatomy); Eye movements; Female; Fixation, Ocular; Hand eye coordination; Human behavior; Humans; Infant; Infant Behavior; Infants; Object motion; Parent-Child Relations; Parents; Parents & parenting; Psychomotor Performance; Science programs; Social aspects; Social behavior; Social factors; Social interactions; Switches; Toys; Verbal communication; Visual perception; Visual stimuli; Visual task performance; Indiana; United States > US
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0079659

The coordination of visual attention among social partners is central to many components of human behavior and human development. Previous research has focused on one pathway to the coordination of looking behavior by social partners, gaze following. The extant evidence shows that even very young infants follow the direction of another's gaze but they do so only in highly constrained spatial contexts because gaze direction is not a spatially precise cue as to the visual target and not easily used in spatially complex social interactions. Our findings, derived from the moment-to-moment tracking of eye gaze of one-year-olds and their parents as they actively played with toys, provide evidence for an alternative pathway, through the coordination of hands and eyes in goal-directed action. In goal-directed actions, the hands and eyes of the actor are tightly coordinated both temporally and spatially, and thus, in contexts including manual engagement with objects, hand movements and eye movements provide redundant information about where the eyes are looking. Our findings show that one-year-olds rarely look to the parent's face and eyes in these contexts but rather infants and parents coordinate looking behavior without gaze following by attending to objects held by the self or the social partner. This pathway, through eye-hand coupling, leads to coordinated joint switches in visual attention and to an overall high rate of looking at the same object at the same time, and may be the dominant pathway through which physically active toddlers align their looking behavior with a social partner.