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When do infants begin to follow a point?
Bennett I Bertenthal1, Ty W Boyer2, Samuel Harding1
1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University.
Insights
Four- and six-month-old infants can follow pointing gestures, challenging the 9-12 month consensus. This early communicative development suggests infants preferentially attend to social cues for understanding communication.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Infant Communication
Background:
- Infant understanding of pointing gestures is a key developmental milestone.
- Current consensus suggests infants follow pointing gestures at 9-12 months.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if younger infants (4-6 months) can follow pointing gestures.
- To determine if infants preferentially attend to pointing gestures over other stimuli.
Main Methods:
- Spatial cueing paradigm with varying stimulus-target onset asynchrony (SOA).
- Experiments included pointing gestures, foils, and non-social stimuli (arrows).
- Tested 4- and 6-month-old infants' attention shifts and preferences.
Main Results:
- 4- and 6-month-olds shifted attention to cued direction with pointing gestures and foils at both SOAs.
- Older infants (within the study group) shifted attention only to pointing gestures at a shorter SOA (100 ms).
- Infants showed a preference for attending to pointing gestures over foils and arrows.
Conclusions:
- 4- and 6-month-old infants can preferentially select and follow pointing gestures.
- This early ability supports the development of triadic communication in infants.
- Challenges the established timeline for understanding pointing gestures in infancy.
Abstract:
Infants' understanding of a pointing gesture represents a major milestone in their communicative development. The current consensus is that infants are not capable of following a pointing gesture until 9-12 months of age. In this article, we present evidence from 4- and 6-month-old infants challenging this conclusion. Infants were tested with a spatial cueing paradigm in Experiment 1 (500-ms stimulus-target onset asynchrony [SOA]) and Experiment 2 (100-ms SOA). The results revealed that the younger infants shifted their attention in the cued direction when presented with a pointing gesture and with a foil (i.e., same size and shape as pointing gesture) at both SOAs. Older infants shifted their attention only in response to the pointing gesture at 100-ms SOA. Experiment 3 tested infants' preferences for the social stimulus (i.e., pointing gesture) relative to the foil and a non-social stimulus (i.e., an arrow). The results revealed that infants are biased to selectively attend to the pointing gesture. Taken together, these results suggest that 4- and 6-month-old infants are capable of preferentially selecting and following a pointing gesture. It is theorized that this early capacity assists infants in their developing understanding of triadic forms of communication.
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