Poster #200 - The Joint Attention Disconnect: Comparing Babies in the Wild and Babies in the lab

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Both observational (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986) and laboratory studies (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005) show that infants’ ability to coordinate attention with a social partner predicts later social and cognitive development. The consensus assumption –and reasonable hypothesis– is that coordinated attention with the parent and social cue following in laboratory studies tap the same underlying joint attention processes.

Recent studies of joint attention in free-flowing interactions with parents raise doubts about this assumption. In these interactions, infants rarely look to their parent’s face but instead their eyes closely follow parent hand actions. Laboratory studies (with the experimenter as a social partner) measure infants’ ability to follow gaze. How are these joint attention (JA) skills –with parent in play, with strangers in experiments– related?

Method. 9-month-old infants (n=27) participated in two contexts to measure JA (Figure 1). In Joint Play, parents and infants wore head-mounted eye-trackers as they jointly played with toys for 6 minutes. JA was defined as gaze directed to the same object at the same time and was classified as gaze-follow and hand-follow based on Yu & Smith (2016).

There were 12 trials in the Discrete trial test: 6 GAZE trials in which the experimenter presented spatially two objects and turned her head and looked at one object for about 5 sec and 6 GAZE- HOLD trials in which the experimenter turned her head, looked at one object, picked it up and held it for 5 sec. The principle measure was infant gaze to the cued object and experimenter’s face during the social cue.

Results. Infants looked at the parent face 19% of time and were jointly attending (had gaze fixated on the same object) 21% of time during Joint play (Table 1). During these JA bouts, the infant looked at the parent face 0.6% of time and the parent and/or child was holding the object 86% of the time. During the cue of the Discrete trials, infants looked at the experimenter’s face 20% of time and at the cued object 61% of time. However, object looks dominated GAZE-HOLD Trials (M=83%, SD=9%; Face looks=8%) but not GAZE trials (Object M=40%, SD=11%; Face looks=33%). These results indicate the power of hands in both contexts as hand actions pull infant attention towards held objects. There were marked individual differences in both tasks.

Multiple regression considered the relations across measures of JA in Parent-infant play, GAZE-HOLD trials, and GAZE trials (Figure 1). There were no significant relations between GAZE-HOLD and Joint play and between GAZE trials and Joint play, but there were strong correlations between parent and infant eye-hand coordination in Joint play that predicted successful joint attention during play.

Discussion. Parent and infant’s hand-eye coordination predicts joint attention and the smoothness of social interactions in free-flowing behavior but has minimal relations to behaviors in discrete trial measures of gaze following. We will discuss the potentially independent contributions to language learning.

Authors

• Catalina Suarez-Rivera, Indiana University
  Presenting Author

• Linda B Smith, Indiana University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chen Yu, Indiana University
  Non-Presenting Author