Joint attention
Scaife and Bruner were the first researchers to present a cross-sectional description of children's ability to follow eye gaze in 1975.
This early research showed it was possible for an adult to bring certain objects in the environment to an infant's attention using eye gaze.
[1] Subsequent research demonstrates that two important skills in joint attention are following eye gaze and identifying intention.
Joint attention is important for many aspects of language development including comprehension, production and word learning.
Episodes of joint attention provide children with information about their environment, allowing individuals to establish reference from spoken language and learn words.
The ability to establish joint attention may be negatively affected by deafness, blindness, and developmental disorders such as autism.
[8] Individuals who engage in triadic joint attention must understand both gaze and intention to establish common reference.
Theory of mind and joint attention are important precursors to a fully developed grasp of another individual's mental activity.
[13] While joint attention is theorized to be an important precursor to theory of mind, some evidence suggests that individuals engage in these tasks separately.
[11] Episodes of joint attention provide children with a great deal of information about objects by establishing reference and intention.
[18] Joint attention makes relevant aspects of the context salient, helping children comprehend what is taking place.
Recent work also links factors involved in the mental representation of language and intentional states, including word knowledge and joint attention, with degree of executive functioning.
[20] This increased level of joint attention aids in encouraging normal language development, including word comprehension and production.
[20] When joint attention is present, it plays an important role in word learning, a crucial aspect of language development.
Joint attention and the ability to attend to an aspect of one's environment are fundamental to normal relationships that rely on the sharing of experience and knowledge.
In addition to language development, joint attention serves the function of preparing infants for more complex social structures involved in adult conversation.
[3] When caregiver does not respond in a similar manner, child exhibits a series of responses that were first studied in early 1970s by Edward Tronick[27] in collaboration with pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton at the time when the latter was creating the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale.
[2] Infants also will display joint attention activities, such as communicative gestures, social referencing, and using the behavior of others to guide response to novel things.
[11] At age 18 months, infants are capable of following an individual's gaze to outside their visual field and establishing (representative) joint attention.
[26] 18-month-olds also grasp the intentional, referential nature of looking, the mentalistic experience of seeing and the role of eyes[11] and are skilled at following both gaze and pointing with precision.
[30] Furthermore, mothers who are unable to successfully establish regular joint attention with their child rate that infant lower on scales of social competence.
The ventromedial frontal cortex has been demonstrated to be related to theory of mind type task involving the assignment of mental states to others.
[32] Issues in the BA10 areas have been implicated as a possible neurological correlate for autism spectrum disorder which is often characterized by deficits in joint attention.
Neurons in a small area of the posterior superior temporal sulcus, so called the "gaze following patch", have been found to respond to the object that another conspecific is looking at and thereby enabling the observer to establish joint attention.
[6] Though typically it is argued that primate species other than apes do not engage in joint attention, there is some evidence that rhesus monkeys do.
[39] They use a number of different cues to engage in shared focus, including head movement and eye gaze.
[6] Infant chimpanzees start to follow tap, point, and head turn cues of an experimenter by nine months of age.
[40] For instance, nonhuman primates that grow up in a human environment are more likely to follow pointing and gaze, similar to canids.
[41] In addition, when comparing animals and humans and they differ by life history stages, they are likely to show a joint attention deficit.
[42][43] Additionally, there is the issue that the evidence to support claims about absence of effects rarely report correct statistically non-significant results in a clear and formal manner.
