Psychological Sciences, University of California, Merced, United States.
Psychological Sciences, University of California, Merced, United States.
Infant Behav Dev. 2021 May;63:101566. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101566. Epub 2021 Apr 21.
Parent-child interactions support the development of a wide range of socio-cognitive abilities in young children. As infants become increasingly mobile, the nature of these interactions change from person-oriented to object-oriented, with the latter relying on children's emerging ability to engage in joint attention. Joint attention is acknowledged to be a foundational ability in early child development, broadly speaking, yet its operationalization has varied substantially over the course of several decades of developmental research devoted to its characterization. Here, we outline two broad research perspectives-social and associative accounts-on what constitutes joint attention. Differences center on the criteria for what qualifies as joint attention and regarding the hypothesized developmental mechanisms that underlie the ability. After providing a theoretical overview, we introduce a joint attention coding scheme that we have developed iteratively based on careful reading of the literature and our own data coding experiences. This coding scheme provides objective guidelines for characterizing mulitmodal parent-child interactions. The need for such guidelines is acute given the widespread use of this and other developmental measures to assess atypically developing populations. We conclude with a call for open discussion about the need for researchers to include a clear description of what qualifies as joint attention in publications pertaining to joint attention, as well as details about their coding. We provide instructions for using our coding scheme in the service of starting such a discussion.
亲子互动有助于幼儿多种社会认知能力的发展。随着婴儿的活动能力不断增强，这些互动的性质从以人为导向转变为以物为导向，后者依赖于儿童正在发展的共同注意力能力。一般来说，共同注意力被认为是儿童早期发展的基础能力，但在过去几十年的发展研究中，其特征的描述方式存在很大差异。在这里，我们概述了构成共同注意力的两种广泛的研究视角，即社会和联想观点。差异的中心在于符合共同注意力的标准是什么，以及构成这种能力的假设发展机制是什么。在提供理论概述之后，我们介绍了一种共同注意力编码方案，该方案是我们基于仔细阅读文献和自己的数据编码经验逐步开发的。该编码方案为描述多模态亲子互动提供了客观的指导方针。鉴于这种方法和其他发展性评估方法被广泛用于评估发育异常的人群，因此非常需要这种指导方针。最后，我们呼吁研究人员在与共同注意力相关的出版物中明确描述符合共同注意力的标准，并详细说明其编码，以开展此类讨论。我们提供了使用我们的编码方案的说明，以启动这样的讨论。
