The capacity for joint visual attention in the infant
Scaife and Bruner produced the first systematic description of infants following another person's gaze. They tested children across a range of ages, and reported that most infants of eight to ten months followed an adult's line of regard, and that all of those aged eleven to fourteen months did. The finding matters because it established that an adult can direct an infant's attention to something in the world using nothing but where they look, which is the beginning of shared attention. Everything built on it since concerns what that shared focus makes possible: the ability to establish what a word refers to, and therefore language learning, along with the later ability to read what another person intends. This page describes the finding from public material, because no abstract of the 1975 paper is publicly available.
Scaife and Bruner produced the first systematic description of infants following another person's gaze. They tested children across a range of ages, and reported that most infants of eight to ten months followed an adult's line of regard, and that all of those aged eleven to fourteen months did. The finding matters because it established that an adult can direct an infant's attention to something in the world using nothing but where they look, which is the beginning of shared attention. Everything built on it since concerns what that shared focus makes possible: the ability to establish what a word refers to, and therefore language learning, along with the later ability to read what another person intends. This page describes the finding from public material, because no abstract of the 1975 paper is publicly available.
Written from the public account of the finding this paper reported.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
253, 265-266. Cited in the vault correction, not in the article body.
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- Prime Time Never Died, It Started Charging Admission, Why We Gather
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1038/253265a0
DOI: 10.1038/253265a0