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Summary Infancy. Task 7. Social Cognition and Joint Attention
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Infancy Task 7 Joint attention and social cognitionLearning goals:
1. Development of social cognition and joint attention
2. Gaze cueing paradigm
3.
1. Development of social cognition and joint attention
Social cognition refers to the ability to understand other people. Two types of interaction:
- Dyadic (person–person) interaction
In the early months, infants primarily engage in face-to-face interactions. These interactions
are characterized by reciprocation of affect and emotions between social partners. Newborns
are sensitive to faces looking at them, but do not appear to have particular social expectations
or show reduced attention or affect towards a social partner who suddenly stops interacting.
However, with only six weeks of interactive experience, infants show a classic still-face
effect. They distinguish between an adult who interacts in a relevant way by providing
contingent feedback compared with someone who interacts in an irregular way. Within the
first months, infants can detect small perturbations in the flow of interpersonal interaction.
Together with a sensitivity to social cues, by 3 months, infants have the skills to understand
the relevance of the social signals necessary for learning and communication.
- Triadic (person–object–person) relations
A key transition in early development. Triadic interactions involve two people in relation to
some third external object, situation or event. The capacity for joint attention emerges at five
months or nine months of age or later. These interactions are essential for the development of
abilities such as language and imitation: to learn the name for a novel object the infant must
know what they are talking about, it helps them establish the relevance of social information
(aimed at them or not). They can then use these cues to guide their attention towards the
world and to learn more effectively, as shown in enhanced neural processing of an uncued
object during test trials. ERP paradigms have shown that infants process objects differently
depending on social context (joint attention). A neural correlate indexing attentional
processes, was enhanced in amplitude when infants were engaged in a joint attention
interaction (adult looking at child and then at object) compared with a nonjoint attention
interaction (adult only looking at object).
Experiments with 9 month old infants
They were presented with a face that occasionally looked right or left after a brief appearance
of an object at one or the other side of the computer screen. To avoid infants being distracted
by the object, the object was removed from the screen at the same time as the gaze shift
occurred. The gaze direction of the face either coincided with the object location (congruent)
or was opposite to it (incongruent).
Infants looked longer at a face that gazed toward recurrently appearing objects than they did
to a face that always looked in the opposite direction of the object location. This cannot be
accounted for by the ‘gaze-cueing’ effect, or by reflexive orienting because that would
increase infants’ attention to the peripheral object and not the face. However, eye contact is
important because infants do not prefer the stimulus with greater congruency when only the
face motion is congruent but the eyes are not. And when direct gaze was replaced with closed
eyes, infants did not discriminate between congruent and incongruent gaze positions, even
when lateral motion and gaze position coincide. Infants can discriminate between different
gaze directions and they can encode the direction of eye gaze, in relation to the location of an
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