What have we learned about infant visual attention in the first 25 years of the 21st century?

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the primary view of infant visual attention development focused on a transition across the first postnatal year from being stimulus-driven to goal-driven, reflecting a broader shift from subcortical to cortical control. This perspective was supported by decades of infant looking-time studies. However, our understanding of infant attention has significantly evolved over the past 25 years, shaped by both theoretical advancements and new technological and methodological tools.

Parents' multimodal spatial language structures infants' in-the-moment attention during spatial play.

We asked how caregivers use spatial language and deictic gestures, in addition to object labeling, with their infants during spatial play, and how such spatial multimodal input scaffolds infants' in-the-moment attention. Forty-nine North American middle-class racially and ethnically diverse caregivers (four fathers, 45 mothers; 51% White and not Hispanic) and their 9-month-old infants (15 girls, 34 boys; 43% White and not Hispanic) played with a puzzle while wearing head-mounted eye trackers. Results showed that caregivers' speech with spatial words or objects labels extended the duration of infants' looking at the puzzle, compared to looking accompanied by utterances without such words.

From woof woof to dog: Interactions between parents' use of sound symbolic words and infants' vocabulary development.

Sound symbols, such as "woof woof" for a dog's barking, imitate the physical properties of their referents. Turkish is a sound symbolically rich language that allows flexible use of such words in different linguistic forms. The current study examined Turkish-speaking parents' use of sound symbolic words to their 14- and 20-month-olds and the concurrent and longitudinal relations between parents' sound symbolic input and infants' vocabulary knowledge.