Documenting Multimodal Joint Attention in Parent and Preschool-Aged Child Dyads

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

From birth, parents work to engage their children via facial expressions, touch, and language, among other cues. These interactions lay the foundation for children’s engagement in joint attention – a process that involves the intentional sharing of attention between two people and an object of mutual focus (Bakeman & Adamson, 1984). Joint attention emerges around 9 months and is typically well-established by 18 months (Mundy & Gomes, 1998). Consequently, researchers have focused on this narrow age range, with disregard to any potential changes to the interaction style as children become sophisticated social partners. There are very few studies documenting the joint attention style of older children and their parents, despite the implications of reading aloud (Montag et al., 2015) or scaffolding interactions (Wasik & Jacobi-Vessels, 2017) during this stage of development. Children participating in the current study are between 3.5 and 5.5 years of age – an age at which their joint attention skills should be firmly established. Here, we investigate how parents use cues consisting of one or more sensory modalities to direct their child’s attention during a storybook task and a modeling task.
In our previous work, we have found that parents frequently attempt to engage their child using multimodal cues, despite the dyad’s ability to communicate proficiently in the auditory modality. In the current study, we employ a precise coding scheme (Figure 1) to systematically identify the success or failure of each bid the parent makes, while also making note of the particular cues (auditory, visual, tactile), or combination of cues, parents use in attempting to initiate joint attention with their children. Relatedly, we predict that dyads will persist in eliciting joint attention through multiple sensory modality cues. However, given the exploratory nature of the study, this is an open question. It is also possible that after children have a well-developed vocabulary and prepare to enter school, their joint attention style changes, shifting to rely more so on the auditory modality.
As part of an on-going project, we have 35 recordings of parent-child dyads (MChildAge = 56.38 months) of various racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Dyads participated in 2 unsupervised tasks, both ~10 minutes in length. In the first task, dyads were instructed to talk through a wordless picture book as they would at home. In the second task, 35 parent-child dyads attempted to recreate a marble run based on an already assembled model. Upon the completion of coding, bids will be quantified in SPSS based on the number of cues incorporated in a bid, as well as analyzed using a linear regression to determine which types of bids, both in number and in sensory qualities, are more likely to result in successful joint attention. Findings will provide important insights into joint attention between parents and their older children, specifically as they prepare to enter formal education. Such qualitative knowledge can inform how children this age interact with adults, highlighting how parents and teachers can tailor their interactions to increase successful engagement.

Authors

• Allison Gabouer, University of California, Merced
  Presenting Author

• Maritza Miramontes, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• James Z Sullivan, University of California - Merced
  Non-Presenting Author

• Heather Bortfeld, University of California, Merced
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rose M Scott, University of California - Merced
  Non-Presenting Author