Abstract
Gaze following is an early-emerging skill in infancy argued to be fundamental to joint attention and later language development. However, how gaze following emerges is a topic of great debate. Representational theories assume that in order to follow adults’ gaze, infants must have a rich sensitivity to adults’ communicative intention from birth. In contrast, learning-based theories hold that infants may learn to gaze follow based on low-level social reinforcement, without the need to understand others’ mental states. Nagai et al. (2006) successfully taught a robot to gaze follow through social reinforcement and found that the robot learned in stages: first in the horizontal plane, and later in the vertical plane—a prediction that does not follow from representational theories. In the current study, we tested this prediction in an eye-tracking paradigm. Six-month-olds did not follow gaze in either the horizontal or vertical plane, whereas 12-month-olds and 18-month-olds only followed gaze in the horizontal plane. These results confirm the core prediction of the robot model, suggesting that children may also learn to gaze follow through social reinforcement coupled with a structured learning environment.
Highlights
Gaze following, or the ability to look where a social partner is looking, is a critical milestone in human sociocognitive development (Tomasello, 1995)
In the current article we focus on the predictions of a developmental robotic simulation of the emergence of gaze following based on low-level learning mechanisms
Latency was shorter for control than gaze trials—main effect of condition: F(1, 36) = 20.49, p < .001; η2 = 1.03e−1, BF10 = 283—and there was moderate evidence for no difference in latency in the horizontal and vertical planes—main effect of plane: F(1, 36) = .001, p = .98; η2 = 6.00e−6, BF01 = 5.71. In this experiment we tested the predictions of Nagai et al.’s (2006) robotic implementation of the development of gaze following, that infants in the early stages of gaze following should first learn in the horizontal plane, and the vertical plane
Summary
The ability to look where a social partner is looking, is a critical milestone in human sociocognitive development (Tomasello, 1995). Some influential representational theories assume that gaze following relies on infants’ capacity (not learned and present from birth) to be sensitive to others’ communicative intentions or mental states (e.g., BaronCohen, 1995; Csibra & Gergely, 2009). On these accounts, infants are born with a receptivity to adults as intentional communicative agents, and based on this, look where adults look in order to obtain information. Others argue that this is not an ability that is present from birth, at a certain time point the ability to read others’ intentions and follow gaze ‘switches on,’ supported by the finding that 6-month-old infants need the presence of ostensive cues (direct gaze and infant directed speech) in order to follow gaze (Hernik & Broesch, 2018; Senju & Csibra, 2008)
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