Detecting joint attention events in mother-infant dyads: Sharing looks cannot be reliably identified by naive third-party observers.

ABSTRACT: Joint attention, or sharing attention with another individual about an object or event, is a critical behaviour that emerges in pre-linguistic infants and predicts later language abilities. Given its importance, it is perhaps surprising that there is no consensus on how to measure joint attention in prelinguistic infants. A rigorous definition proposed by Siposova & Carpenter (2019) requires the infant and partner to gaze alternate between an object and each other (coordination of attention) and exchange communicative signals (explicit acknowledgement of jointly sharing attention). However, Hobson and Hobson (2007) proposed that the quality of gaze between individuals is, in itself, a sufficient communicative signal that demonstrates sharing of attention. They proposed that observers can r

SUBMITTER: Graham KE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8301644 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature