Influence of early social interactions on a sensitivity to having one's own gaze followed

• In Event: Recognising and shaping opportunities for learning: neurocognitive insight into active learning in early infancy

Abstract

Essential for determining success in directing someone else’s gaze, detecting when one’s own gaze has been followed is a critical component of initiating joint attention (IJA). In a previous study, we used EEG to record infant neural responses at 6.5 and 9.5 months during observation of an adult either turning to look at the same object as the infant (congruent actor), or turning to look at a different object (incongruent actor). Greater suppression of alpha band activity in the congruent compared to incongruent condition was revealed at both ages in centro-parietal regions, but the effect of congruency on alpha suppression was stronger at 9.5 months. Additionally, only at this later age did infants demonstrate a preference towards looking at the congruent actor. These results suggest that although infants are sensitive to others’ gaze following at 6.5 months, important neural and behavioural developments occur between 6.5 and 9.5 months that allow infants to detect that their own gaze has been followed. An important outstanding question is how the early social environment may influence the emergence of this crucial IJA component, with early face-to-face interactions hypothesized to support learning of a correspondence between an infant's own gaze direction and the gaze direction of a social partner.

To address this question, we made video recordings of the same infants included in our EEG study interacting with their mothers at 3.5 and 6.5 months postpartum. Mothers and infants were seated opposite one another in a small room with six toys attached to the wall. The gaze direction and target of mothers and infants was coded frame-by-frame, with events such as ‘infant gaze shifts from object to face’ and ‘mother follows infant’ then extracted from the coded data.

We used linear mixed models to relate these events to alpha band activity in central and parietal clusters during the EEG task. Relationships were revealed between gaze behaviour and alpha suppression at both ages in the congruent condition. Specifically, more time spent in shared gaze after mothers followed infants at 3.5m was related to greater suppression in parietal regions at 6.5 months [t(47)=-2.64, p=0.01]; more infant gaze shifts from object to mother [t(46.1)= -2.98, p=0.005] and mother to object [t(46.1)= -3.12, p=0.003] was related to more central suppression at the concurrent 6.5 month time point; and more instances of mother follows infant gaze shifts at 6.5 months was related to more parietal suppression at 9.5 months [t(47)= -2.85, p=0.007].

Such findings indicate that gaze behaviour of both mother and infant are important for an emerging sensitivity to others’ gaze following, and is in keeping with research suggesting that caregiver following rather than directing during early interactions supports the development of IJA.

Authors

• Holly Rayson, Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, CNRS
  Presenting Author

• James Bonaiuto, Institut des Sciences Cognitives-Marc Jeannerod, CNRS
  Non-Presenting Author

• Pier Ferrari, Institut des Sciences Cognitives-Marc Jeannerod, CNRS
  Non-Presenting Author

• Bhismadev Chakrabarti, University of Reading
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lynne Murray, University of Reading
  Non-Presenting Author