Social connectedness without eye contact: 18- but not 9-month-olds use proximal touch to infer third-party joint attention during observational learning.

Decades of research have highlighted the important role of joint attention in early cultural learning. However, most previous studies focused on a limited range of joint attention settings involving the learner's participation in joint attention, characterized by eye contact and triadic gaze following. This has created an incomplete picture, tending to neglect the diversity in which infants experience social connectedness in their daily lives.

Revisiting the Object-Processing Paradigm in the Study of Gaze Cues: What Two Decades of Research Have Taught Us About Infant Social Learning.

Infants are highly sensitive to social stimuli from early on in ontogeny. Social cues, including others' gaze, not only capture and guide infants' attention, but also modulate the efficiency in which the infant (brain) encodes and recognizes information. Over the last two decades, the novelty preference based object-processing paradigm has been instrumental in investigating this phenomenon experimentally.

Direct and Observed Joint Attention Modulate 9-Month-Old Infants' Object Encoding.

Sharing joint visual attention to an object with another person biases infants to encode qualitatively different object properties compared to a parallel attention situation lacking interpersonal sharedness. This study investigated whether merely observing joint attention amongst others shows the same effect. In Experiment 1 (first-party replication experiment), = 36 9-month-old German infants were presented with a violation-of-expectation task during which they saw an adult looking either in the direction of the infant (eye contact) or to the side (no eye contact) before and after looking at an object.

Validation of an open source, remote web-based eye-tracking method (WebGazer) for research in early childhood.

Measuring eye movements remotely via the participant's webcam promises to be an attractive methodological addition to in-person eye-tracking in the lab. However, there is a lack of systematic research comparing remote web-based eye-tracking with in-lab eye-tracking in young children. We report a multi-lab study that compared these two measures in an anticipatory looking task with toddlers using WebGazer.

Processing third-party social interactions in the human infant brain.

The understanding of developing social brain functions during infancy relies on research that has focused on studying how infants engage in first-person social interactions or view individual agents and their actions. Behavioral research suggests that observing and learning from third-party social interactions plays a foundational role in early social and moral development. However, the brain systems involved in observing third-party social interactions during infancy are unknown.

Observing others' joint attention increases 9-month-old infants' object encoding.

In direct interactions with others, 9-month-old infants' learning about objects is facilitated when the interaction partner addresses the infant through eye contact before looking toward an object. In this study we investigated whether similar factors promote infants' observational learning from third-party interactions. In Experiment 1, 9-month-old typically developing infants from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds from urban Germany (N = 32, 13 female) were presented with four types of videos showing one object and two adults.

Infants' Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age.

This study examined 7-to-13.5-month-old middle-class Western infants' visual orienting to third-party interactions in parallel with their social attention behavior during own social interactions (Leipzig, Germany). In Experiment 1, 9.

Social interaction targets enhance 13-month-old infants' associative learning.

Infants are attentive to third-party interactions, but the underlying mechanisms of this preference remain understudied. This study examined whether 13-month-old infants (N = 32) selectively learn cue-target associations guiding them to videos depicting a social interaction scene. In a visual learning task, two geometrical shapes were repeatedly paired with two kinds of target videos: two adults interacting with one another (social interaction) or the same adults acting individually (non-interactive control).