Understanding the referential nature of looking: infants' preference for object-directed gaze

Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 6, 2026

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm
06:07

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

Published on: May 15, 2019

Atsushi Senju1, Gergely Csibra, Mark H Johnson

  • 1Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, School of Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK. a.senju@bbk.ac.uk

Cognition
|March 29, 2008
PubMed

Insights

Nine-month-old infants use eye contact to understand where others are looking. They pay more attention when gaze direction matches object location, showing early social cognition development.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Infant Perception

Background:

  • Understanding gaze direction is crucial for social interaction.
  • Early infancy research explores how infants interpret social cues.
  • The role of communicative intent in gaze perception is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To determine if 9-month-old infants link gaze direction with object location.
  • To investigate if communicative cues, like eye contact, influence this sensitivity.
  • To explore the development of referential gaze understanding in infants.

Main Methods:

  • Four experiments using visual stimuli presented to 9-month-old infants.
  • Infants observed a face shifting gaze towards or away from objects.
  • Measured infant looking time to assess attention to gaze-object congruency.
  • Controlled for spatial congruency and the effect of prior eye contact.

Main Results:

  • Infants looked longer when gaze direction was congruent with object location.
  • This gaze-object congruency effect was dependent on a preceding period of eye contact.
  • Simple spatial congruency alone did not elicit the effect.
  • Infants demonstrated sensitivity to communicative cues in gaze perception.

Conclusions:

  • Nine-month-old infants can encode eye direction in referential terms when communicative cues are present.
  • Infants show a bias to attend to scenes where gaze is directed towards objects.
  • This suggests early development of joint attention mechanisms and social understanding.

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