One-year-old infants follow others' voice direction

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Federico Rossano1, Malinda Carpenter, Michael Tomasello

  • 1Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. federico_rossano@eva.mpg.de

Psychological Science
|October 17, 2012
PubMed

Insights

One-year-old infants can use voice direction to determine an adult's focus of attention. This auditory cue helps infants establish joint attention, a skill not observed in chimpanzees.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Comparative Cognition
  • Auditory Perception

Background:

  • Understanding others' attentional focus is crucial for social development.
  • Previous research has focused on visual cues for inferring attention.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if infants can infer an adult's focus of attention using only auditory cues (voice direction).
  • To compare infant abilities with those of chimpanzees on this auditory attention task.

Main Methods:

  • Infants (12- and 16-month-olds) and chimpanzees were tested on their ability to locate a target toy based on an adult's vocalizations.
  • The adult vocalized from behind a barrier, directing attention to one of two boxes.
  • Control conditions ruled out simple sound localization as the basis for infant responses.

Main Results:

  • Infants successfully followed the voice direction to find the correct toy, indicating they inferred the adult's focus of attention.
  • Infants' performance was not affected by the adult's proximity to the incorrect box.
  • Chimpanzees performed at chance level, failing to infer attention from voice direction.

Conclusions:

  • 1-year-old infants can infer an adult's attentional focus using auditory information alone.
  • This auditory-based inference of attention is a human-specific ability, not present in chimpanzees.
  • The ability to use voice direction to infer attention is a foundational skill for developing joint attention.

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