Face-Looking as a Real-Time Process in Mind-Mindedness: Timely Coordination Between Mothers' Gaze on Infants' Faces and Mind-Related Comments.

Maternal mind-mindedness refers to a caregiver's tendency to respond to their infants as individuals with their own thoughts, feelings, desires, and beliefs. Although previous studies have focused on maternal speech in quantifying mind-mindedness, maternal mind-mindedness should manifest not only as mind-related comments but also through non-verbal behaviors during infant-mother interactions. In this study, we investigated the relationship between maternal gaze at the infant's face and typical verbal measurement of mind-mindedness in free-flowing interactions. Forty 11- to 13-month-old infants and their mothers participated in the study; the mothers were asked to wear a head-mounted eye tracker to measure their gaze during infant-mother free-play interactions. We measured the proportion of time mothers looked at the infant's face when it was present in the mother's field of view and examined the relationship between the face-looking proportion and verbal measurement of mothers' mind-mindedness. Mothers who displayed appropriate mind-related comments looked at the faces of their infants more frequently. Moreover, their looking was coordinated in a timely manner with appropriate mind-related comments compared with other comments. Our findings suggest that mothers looking at infants' faces supports comments regarding infants' mental states and shed new light on real-time behaviors underlying mothers' mentalization processes.