Journal ArticleDOI
What minds have in common is space : Spatial mechanisms serving joint visual attention in infancy
TLDR
For instance, this article showed that infants look where someone else is looking in the first 18 months of their life, by extrapolating from the orientation of the mother's head and eyes to the intersection of the line of sight within a relatively precise zone of the infant's own visual space.Abstract:
A series of experiments is reported which show that three successive mechanisms are involved in the first 18 months of life in ‘looking where someone else is looking’. The earliest ‘ecological’ mechanism enables the infant to detect the direction of the adult's visual gaze within the baby's visual field but the mother's signal alone does not allow the precise localization of the target. Joint attention to the same physical object also depends on the intrinsic, attention-capturing properties of the object in the environment. By about 12 months, we have evidence for presence of a new ‘geometric’ mechanism. The infant extrapolates from the orientation of the mother's head and eyes, the intersection of the mother's line of sight within a relatively precise zone of the infant's own visual space. A third ‘representational’ mechanism emerges between 12 and 18 months, with an extension of joint reference to places outside the infant's visual field.
None of these mechanisms require the infant to have a theory that others have minds; rather the perceptual systems of different observers ‘meet’ in encountering the same objects and events in the world. Such a ‘realist’ basis for interpersonal knowledge may offer an alternative starting point for development of intrapersonal knowledge, rather than the view that mental events can only be known by construction of a theory.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later.
Josep Call,Michael Tomasello +1 more
TL;DR: The conclusion for the moment is that chimpanzees understand others in terms of a perception-goal psychology, as opposed to a full-fledged, human-like belief-desire psychology.
Journal ArticleDOI
Social Cognition, joint attention and communicative Competence from 9 to 15 months of age
TL;DR: It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication.
Journal ArticleDOI
Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing.
Uta Frith,Chris D. Frith +1 more
TL;DR: The mentalizing (theory of mind) system of the brain is probably in operation from 18 months of age, allowing implicit attribution of intentions and other mental states, and from this age children are able to explain the misleading reasons that have given rise to a false belief.
Journal ArticleDOI
The eyes have it: the neuroethology, function and evolution of social gaze
TL;DR: The hypothesis that gaze following is "hard-wired" in the brain, and may be localized within a circuit linking the superior temporal sulcus, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex is discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Eye contact detection in humans from birth
TL;DR: The results show that, from birth, human infants prefer to look at faces that engage them in mutual gaze and that, at an early age, healthy babies show enhanced neural processing of direct gaze.