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Coordinating Attention to Faces Relates to Response to Joint Attention in the First Year of Life
Responding to joint attention (RJA), or the ability to share attention to an object with another, emerges in the first year of life and is a pivotal skill, foundational for later language and social development. The relative roles of social understanding and features of objects in the environment for early RJA have long been debated (Moore & Dunham, 1995), and are central to understanding the emergence and developmental significance of RJA, and RJA-related deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Bakeman and Adamson’ (1984) characterized two interactive infant-caregiver play states. During passive joint engagement, infants focus primarily on a shared object in the presence of another. Coordinated joint engagement involves infants’ active coordination of attention between another person and an object, increases from 6 to 18 months, predicts language outcomes, and exhibits deficits in toddlers with ASD (Adamson et al., 2009).
Objectives:
This study takes a micro-analytic approach to quantifying passive and coordinated joint engagement states in the context of RJA. This study examined whether where infants look directly after responding to an RJA bid was associated with response sophistication. We hypothesized that the amount of social gaze directly after RJA would increase with age, and positively relate to RJA sophistication, while the amount of non-social gaze directly following RJA would decrease with age and not relate to RJA sophistication.
Methods:
We measured RJA using the Dimensional Joint Attention Assessment (DJAA; Elison et al., 2013). This measure characterizes individual differences in infants’ RJA abilities using 4 series of hierarchically ordered joint attention bids varying in cue redundancy. Higher DJAA scores (range 0-4) reflect the ability to respond to subtler, less redundant bids (i.e., gaze shift and head turn cues, vs. gaze shift, head turn, and verbal cue) for joint attention. The DJAA was administered during naturalistic play at 125 assessments of 90 typically developing infants aged 8 to 16 months (mean=11.4).
The targets of infants’ gaze directly after responding to each RJA bid were coded offline and categorized as social (i.e., looking to the face of the experimenter or caregiver) or non-social (i.e., looking to a toy, object, or anywhere). The proportion of infants’ social and non-social post-RJA looks were calculated for each DJAA assessment. Analyses employed linear mixed models with sex as a covariate.
Results:
Results indicate that age did not predict the proportion of social (t(95)=0.14, p=0.89) or non-social looks (t(121)= 1.52, p=0.13) directly following RJA. However, over and above age-related increases in mean DJAA scores (t(56)=5.43, p<0.01), the proportion of social looking directly after RJA positively predicted mean DJAA scores (t(56)=2.16, p=0.034). Conversely, the proportion of such non-social looks did not predict mean DJAA scores (t(64)=0.96, p=0.34).
Conclusions:
Findings suggest that infants of all ages who reference those around them after responding to an RJA bid exhibit more sophisticated abilities to respond to others’ joint attention cues. Despite the central role of objects in joint attention contexts, the ability to coordinate attention with others after following gaze may play an important role in the emergence of RJA sophistication early in life.