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Published on: March 27, 2012
12- and 18-month-old infants follow gaze to spaces behind barriers
Henrike Moll1, Michael Tomasello
1Department of Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. moll@eva.mpg.de
Insights
Twelve-month-old infants can follow gaze to objects outside their direct line of sight. This demonstrates early infant understanding of others
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Science
- Infant Perception
Background:
- Infants track gaze direction from mid-infancy.
- Previous research focused on infants overcoming barriers to adult sightlines.
- Limited understanding exists regarding infant perception of gaze beyond their own visual field.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if 12- and 18-month-old infants can follow gaze to locations obscured by barriers.
- To determine if infants understand gaze as an act of seeing, even when the target is not visible.
Main Methods:
- Infants observed an experimenter looking behind a barrier that blocked the infant's view.
- Two control conditions and various barrier types were employed.
- Infants' locomotion to gain a viewing angle was measured.
Main Results:
- Both 12- and 18-month-old infants moved to see where the experimenter was looking.
- Infants successfully followed gaze to locations behind barriers.
- Results challenge previous claims about the limitations of infant gaze following.
Conclusions:
- Twelve-month-old infants can follow gaze to targets outside their immediate visual field.
- Infants demonstrate an understanding of 'looking' as a visual act.
- This indicates an earlier development of social cognition than previously thought.
Abstract:
Infants follow the gaze direction of others from the middle of the first year of life. In attempting to determine how infants understand the looking behavior of adults, a number of recent studies have blocked the adult's line of sight in some way (e.g. with a blindfold or with a barrier). In contrast, in the current studies an adult looked behind a barrier which blocked the child's line of sight. Using two different control conditions and several different barrier types, 12- and 18-month-old infants locomoted a short distance in order to gain the proper viewing angle to follow an experimenter's gaze to locations behind barriers. These results demonstrate that, contra Butterworth, even 12-month-old infants can follow gaze to locations outside of their current field of view. They also add to growing evidence that 12-month-olds have some understanding of the looking behaviors of others as an act of seeing.
