Effects of sitting support and positioning on infant-parent coordinated attention

Infant-parent coordination during play is an important facilitator of the development of language, attention, and social cognition. Although the dynamics of triadic interaction in the second year of life are well documented, less is known about how infants and parents coordinate attention earlier in development. Prior work has shown that pre-sitting infants often play facing away from their parents, making visual access to faces difficult. However, it is not yet known whether and how this might affect their ability to coordinate attention to objects. Twenty 5- to 7-month-old infants (10 sitters, 10 nonsitters; 11 girls; nine Hispanic/Latino) were observed while they played with a parent in two conditions: sitting on the floor and sitting in a supportive infant seat. Infants and parents wore head-mounted eye trackers to record their visual attention, and their manual actions were coded from video. In the seat, parents always placed their infants facing toward them, but when sitting on the floor, parents frequently placed their infants facing away to provide manual support from behind. Surprisingly, coordination of attention was not disrupted, but facilitated, when infants faced away from their parents. This was likely due to greater rates of hand-eye coordination for both infants and parents while facing away, which strengthened the validity of the "hand-following" pathway to coordinated attention. Therefore, infants and parents can maintain high degrees of coordination during play without being able to see each other's faces. This phenomenon may have implications for developmental trends in infant attention throughout the first year of life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).