Georgia Southern University, Department of Psychology, United States of America.
Indiana University, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Program in Cognitive Science, United States of America.
Cognition. 2020 Apr;197:104151. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104151. Epub 2019 Dec 24.
Infants' development of joint attention shows significant advances between 9 and 12 months of age, but we still need to learn much more about how infants coordinate their attention with others during this process. The objective of this study was to use eye tracking to systematically investigate how 8- and 12-month-old infants as well as adults dynamically select their focus of attention while observing a social partner demonstrate infant-directed actions. Participants were presented with 16 videos of actors performing simple infant-directed actions from a first-person perspective. Looking times to faces as well as hands-and-objects were calculated for participants at each age, and developmental differences were observed, although all three groups looked more at hands-and-objects than at faces. In order to assess whether visual attention was coordinated with the actors' behaviors, we compared participants looking at faces and objects in response to gaze direction as well as infant-directed actions vs. object-directed actions. By presenting video stimuli that involved continuously changing actions, we were able to document that the likelihood of joint attention changes in both real and developmental time. Overall, adults and 12-month-old infants' visual attention was modulated by gaze cues as well as actions, whereas this was only partially true for 8-month-old infants. Our results reveal that joint attention is not a monolithic process nor does it develop all at once.
婴儿的共同注意力发展在 9 至 12 个月之间有显著进步，但我们仍需要更多地了解婴儿在这一过程中如何与他人协调注意力。本研究的目的是使用眼动追踪技术系统地研究 8 个月和 12 个月大的婴儿以及成年人在观察社交伙伴演示针对婴儿的动作时，如何动态地选择自己的注意力焦点。参与者观看了 16 个从第一人称视角呈现的演员执行简单针对婴儿动作的视频。在每个年龄段，都计算了参与者观看面部和手部-物体的时间，并观察到了发展差异，尽管所有三组都比看脸更多地看手和物体。为了评估视觉注意力是否与演员的行为相协调，我们比较了参与者在观看面部和物体时对注视方向以及针对婴儿的动作与针对物体的动作的反应。通过呈现涉及不断变化的动作的视频刺激，我们能够记录到真实和发展时间中的共同注意力变化的可能性。总体而言，成人和 12 个月大的婴儿的视觉注意力受到注视线索和动作的调节，而 8 个月大的婴儿则不完全如此。我们的研究结果表明，共同注意力不是一个单一的过程，也不是一下子发展起来的。
