Adult ’ S Eyes Trigger Shifts of Visual Attention in Human Infants

131 Abstract— Two experiments examined whether infants shift their visual attention in the direction toward which an adult's eyes turn. A computerized modification of previous joint-attention paradigms revealed that infants as young as 3 months attend in the same direction as the eyes of a digitized adult face. This attention shift was indicated by the latency and direction of their orienting to peripheral probes presented after the face was extinguished. A second experiment found a similar influence of direction of perceived gaze, but also that less peripheral orienting occurred if the central face remained visible during presentation of the probe. This may explain why attention shifts triggered by gaze perception have been difficult to observe in infants using previous naturalistic procedures. Our new method reveals both that direction of perceived gaze can be discriminated by young infants and that this perception triggers corresponding shifts of their own attention. The direction of other people's gaze can reveal where they are attending, and thus indicate sources of potential interest or danger in the environment. Gaze monitoring may have played a crucial role in the evolution of socialization (Humphrey, 1976). In infants, the emergence of the tendency to look where another person looks is a fundamental landmark in the development of referential communication. In standard paradigms for measuring this behavior infants 10 to 12 months old are reliably found to look in the direction toward which adults turn their heads and eyes. Although the direction of another person's attention can be signaled by a combination of his or her eye, head, and body orientation, adult observers are extremely sensitive to eye direction alone (Anstis, Mayhew, & Morley, 1969). This behavioral sensitivity accords with accumulating evidence for specialized gaze detectors within the primate visual system. Many cells in the monkey superior temporal sulcus respond selectively to the direction of perceived gaze (Perrett & Mistlin, 1990). Furthermore, neuropsychological studies of patients with inferotemporal damage, and related lesion studies with monkeys, also suggest there may be specialized detectors for the direction of perceived gaze within the visual system (Campbell, Heywood, Cowey, & Regard, 1990). In reviewing these data, Baron-Cohen (1995) recently proposed that a modular eye direction detector (EDD) plays a central role in the development of social cogni-tion, and implied that it must be operating before the emergence of joint-attention behaviors toward the end of the 1st year of life. Empirical studies have consistently suggested …