The Development of Joint Attention and Communication from 6 to 10 months

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Joint attention is widely agreed to be a key skill in infants’ social development. However, there is still a lack of consensus over what exactly joint attention is, and when it emerges in development (Siposova & Carpenter, 2019). Several researchers have argued that joint attention first emerges at around 9 months, with some suggesting that this is a sudden developmental transition (Tomasello, 1995; Trevarthen & Hubley, 1979). However, these views have been challenged, with other researchers questioning the view of a sudden and discrete cognitive change (de Barbaro et al., 2013; Reddy, 2003), as well as challenging previous claims about the age of emergence of joint attention (Rossmanith et al., 2014; Striano & Bertin, 2005). Our aim was to investigate the very beginnings of joint attention, shedding new light both on its developmental origins and its relation to communication (Carpenter & Leibal, 2011). In doing so, we aimed to address core theoretical questions about what joint attention actually is. Twenty-six infants participated in a longitudinal study from 6 to 10 months of age. This involved five monthly lab visits. In the lab sessions, mother-infant dyads took part in a free-play period, before an experimenter ran a battery of short behavioural tasks that examined a variety of social and non-social skills. Social tasks focused primarily on skills such as joint attention skills (e.g. initiating, responding) and communication (e.g. giving, showing). Non-social tasks focused on skills such as means-end understanding and object permanence, which have also previously been found to undergo important changes during this period (Bates et al., 1976). These were followed by a version of the “Decorated Room” task (Liszkowski & Tomasello, 2011), which examined how infants communicated about objects while the mother carried the infant. The sessions concluded with a maternal interview, with questions related to infants’ social and physical developments. The same questions were also discussed through phone interviews that took place halfway between each monthly session. During test sessions, mothers also completed the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (Putnam et al., 2014) at 6 and 10 months, and the UK Communicative Development Inventories questionnaire (Alcock et al., 2020) at 8 months. Preliminary analyses indicate that over a third of infants (38%) initiated joint attention at 6 months, with a significant increase in initiations between 7-8 months. The data suggest that while some joint attention skills can be identified prior to 8 months, these skills are employed more consistently by infants after this age. Communicative gestures such as showing, giving and requesting emerged at around 8-10 months. Further analyses will be conducted that examine interrelations between joint attention tasks and communication tasks, providing new and detailed insights into the developments occurring in this period. Doing so will contribute to a clearer understanding of the relation between joint attention and communication, which will in turn provide new insights into our understanding of what joint attention actually is.

Authors

• Gideon Salter, University of St Andrews
  Presenting Author

• Malinda Carpenter, University of St Andrews
  Non-Presenting Author