Emergence of Shared Attention From 3 to 11 Months Of Age In Naturalistic Infant-Parent Interactions

ABSTRACT: Attention sharing facilitates infants ’ learning of language, social practices, and personal information. How do attention-sharing skills emerge during the first year? Although infant-parent interactions are well-structured, we do not know how the structure helps infants learn specific joint attention skills like gaze-following and point-following. To address this, we did quasi-naturalistic observation of play between infants (3-11 months) and caregivers. We coded attention shifts, shared attention states, and parents ’ behaviors before infants followed their attention. Results show that attention-sharing start with parents ’ manual actions. Background:- Some theories attribute attention-sharing skills to innate modules (Baron-Cohen, 1995), but this has many problems.- Recent accounts (Moore & Corkum, 1994; Nagai, 2003; Triesch et al, in review) focus on neurally plausible, learning-based models of development. Such models highlight:- describing social input to infants as attention-sharing skills emerge;- detailing partial skills as intermediate products of learning Specific Questions: (1) How are infants ’ and caregivers ’ attention distributed in play?- How much shared attention occurs? (2) What actions do caregivers use to get infants ’ attention?- Do CGs “bootstrap ” shared-attention by imposing objects in infants ’ line-of-sight?- How do CG’s gaze, versus manual actions (pointing to object; waving or tapping) attract infants ’ attention (3) What kinds of events precede shared attention? (4) How do these interactions change with infants ’ age