What Role Do Early Rituals Play In Cooperative Attention?

Joint attention is a concept that involves sharing attention with a partner to a third entity, such as an infant attending simultaneously to both a parent and a toy. Bids for joint attention can include eye contact. Infants display systematic age-related changes in some types of joint attention behaviors, but also display a wide range of behaviors.

To distinguish “true” joint attention from other related types of behaviors, it is important to emphasize the importance of both partners’ knowing together. Greater understanding of joint attention in infancy promises to yield important insights into the development of language and social cognition, and directly informs developmental outcomes. The development of joint attention skills is considered critical to early social, cognitive, and language development.

Four components of joint attention are described: detection of a social partner, detection of a shift of another’s attention, and shifting one’s own attention to match the other person’s. Joint attention in parent-infant interaction has been demonstrated to contribute to infants’ language outcomes. It is in joint attention that infants come to adopt their parents’ stance toward the world and handle objects and confront.

In addition, infants may interpret these actions as instantiating a relation between the person and the object at which their actions are directed. Infants begin to engage in joint attention-related behaviors as they begin to engage in triadic attention sharing.

Infants in the first and second year of life respond to gaze and pointing by orienting to the relevant piece of the world. The experience of participating in a ritual increases in-group affiliation to a greater degree than group activity alone. Joint attention bids utilize gaze orientation to communicate to a social partner that an infant wants the social partner to look at an object.

What is the difference between joint attention and joint reference?

Referential looking in joint attention and social referencing share a negative reinforcement function, where adult attention to environmental stimuli or directly to the child can alleviate fear by terminating aversive events or aversive stimulation. In contrast, social referencing uses adult affective stimuli as discriminative stimuli for avoidance responses in the presence of aversive stimuli.

However, there is a difference in the conditions under which looking occurs in joint attention and social referencing. In joint attention, observing occurs in the presence of both non-ambiguous and standard stimuli due to a history of reinforcement for gaze shifting, while in social referencing, observing occurs only in the presence of ambiguous stimuli.

The overall function of joint attention and social referencing is different. Joint attention initiations are primarily about accessing social positive reinforcement, while social referencing aims to gain information about how to respond in uncertain or ambiguous contexts.

Traditionally, joint attention was defined by cognitive-developmental psychologists and mainly addressed in that literature. In 2004, a contingency analysis of joint attention was outlined, highlighting intervention and research implications for children with autism. This publication has prompted behavior analysts to design and evaluate interventions for ameliorating joint attention deficits in children with autism.

What is the first step in joint attention?

To foster joint attention, start by identifying your child’s natural interests in toys, activities, or actions. This can be done through activities like alphabet letters, light-up toys, or spinning. The team at your pediatric facility should also be aware of their diverse range of services, including diagnostic testing, developmental therapy, feeding therapy, nutrition therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, social work, speech therapy, and therapeutic preschool, kindergarten, and extended day programs. Therapy case managers can also help manage these services effectively.

How are infants connected to the world of people and objects around them?

Infants actively participate in social interactions using their bodies, words, and objects. They are astute observers of others’ behaviors and body language, attending to cues in faces, voices, and bodies before they can speak. Social connections go beyond buffering against loneliness and serve as conduits of healthy development even in infancy. Supportive social connections set the stage for healthy social, emotional, and physical development, and are important for everyone regardless of age.

How does attention develop in infancy?

Attention development begins with “stimulus orienting” in newborns, where they respond to noises by looking or turning their heads. This involuntary form is controlled by the parietal region of the brain. As infants grow older, they can voluntarily focus on things for longer periods, known as sustained attention. This development continues throughout childhood. Executive functioning, the most voluntary part of attention, allows children to focus on tasks, choose enjoyable activities, plan, and control impulses. These processes are mainly controlled by the prefrontal cortex and take a long time to fully develop, still changing as children enter their late teens.

What is joint attention in infancy?

Joint attention refers to a phenomenon whereby two individuals engage in a shared experience, such as a parent and child playing a tickle game. Nevertheless, joint attention does not occur when both individuals are not focused on the object or event in question.

What is the earliest stage in an infant’s development of joint reference and attention?

In the latter half of the first year of life, infants begin to exhibit joint attention, which involves coordinating one’s gaze and attention with another person to an external object or event. This development is often seen as a precursor to understanding others’ intentions and engaging in joint goals and experiences later in toddlerhood and beyond. Joint attention is often discussed in terms of both responding to joint attention (RJA) and initiating joint attention (IJA).

The distinction between RJA and IJA is extensive, but few microgenetic studies have been conducted to elucidate the dynamic interplay of the two constructs. Infants demonstrate social interest and engagement very early in life, with infants looking more to a social partner when that partner alternates attention between an object and the infant rather than directing attention only to the object. Longitudinal work suggests that infants’ gaze following to both parents and strangers increases between 2 and 4 months of age, with accuracy stabilizing by 6-8 months.

Joint attention is often viewed as an important milestone of social cognition, demonstrating early perspective taking and mentalizing abilities associated with later social phenomena unique to humans such as joint intentionality. This perspective emphasizes that joint attention is not passively achieved but necessitates active processing of another’s perspective and intentions by an infant. However, a “leaner” interpretation of joint attention emphasizes the visual mechanisms of gaze following and deemphasizes the role of social cognition.

This interpretation argues that early gaze following and RJA are dependent on an infant’s ability to infer the presence of interesting or salient stimuli from the “geometric orientation” of another’s gaze or head turn.

While 12-15 month-olds show improved ability to locate a target by following adults’ gaze, it is unclear if this should be attributed to spatial orienting precision, attentional control, or maturing social cognition.

Why is it important to understand development of visual attention in infants?

Infant visual attention development is crucial for information gathering and learning, with long-term effects on subsequent development. Studies have shown that infants’ temperament, mothers’ and fathers’ depression, and visual exploration strategies can predict their attention to objects paired with emotional faces. Infants’ attention to objects paired with emotional faces is influenced by their mothers’ and fathers’ depression.

Infants’ facial emotion discrimination is also influenced by their visual exploration strategies. Therefore, understanding infant visual attention development is essential for promoting healthy development.

What characterizes attention in infants?

Infants use attention to guide behavior from birth, shifting their attention to interesting and changing events in their environment. This ability is supported by the orienting response. Infants turn their heads towards new sounds, look at bright, moving objects, and get caught by talking, smiling faces. As young as 5 weeks, they can reach towards bright objects that catch their visual attention, starting the coordination of looking and doing. In the early weeks, infants may be hooked by busy visual scenes, unable to turn away or respond with distress.

What is an example of joint attention?

Joint attention is a behavior where one person intentionally coordinates their focus with another person’s, resulting in intentional and social attention. It is crucial for children with autism, as delays in developing joint attention skills can lead to delays in language development. Children with autism who can use spoken language by age five generally have better success in school, social relationships, and adult life than those who do not.

Intervention can help preschool children with autism learn joint attention and symbolic play skills, which will help them later in life. Research has shown that learning these skills in preschool leads to better language skills, which in turn lead to better social skills, higher academic performance, and success in work and independent living as an adult. ASAP is designed to help teachers, therapists, and parents teach these skills to preschool children with autism.

In summary, joint attention is essential for children with autism to develop social and communication skills, as it helps them communicate effectively throughout their lives.

What are the three stages of joint attention?

Joint attention is a crucial skill for children to develop. There are three levels of joint attention: triadic, dyadic, and shared gaze. Triadic joint attention involves two individuals focusing on an object, requiring them to understand that the other person is also looking at the same object. This type of attention requires at least two individuals to attend to the object and display awareness of shared focus.

Dyadic joint attention is a conversation-like behavior that occurs between adults and infants, starting at two months of age. Adults and infants exchange facial expressions, noises, and speech, with sensitivity to dyadic orientation playing a significant role in the development of dyadic attention. Infants must be able to correctly orient towards in response to attention-seeking interactions.

Shared gaze, the lowest level of joint attention, occurs when two individuals are simply looking at an object. This adaptive trait allows for quicker completion of group effort-related tasks and is believed to be a precursor to theory of mind. Overall, understanding and utilizing these levels of joint attention is essential for children to develop appropriate communication skills.

What is the relationship between infants activity with objects and attention to object appearance?

Infants’ actions are closely linked to their attention and learning of appearance features. Research has shown that infants’ activity with objects is crucial for their ability to use surface features, make edge assignments, and segregate spatially contiguous objects. Additionally, infants learn commonalities across different objects such as shape and texture through manual exploration. This study adds to the existing literature by showing that infants’ manual activity with objects is a mechanism by which appearance features become relevant for infants.

Linking object appearance and the types of actions performed on objects is crucial for recognizing objects. Young infants’ actions on objects may significantly contribute to their ability to integrate information about object appearance and action later in infancy. Actions may help infants learn important links between object appearance and how objects are typically used or what they can do. Exploring objects can also facilitate children’s categorization of objects by highlighting the relations between objects’ appearances and their uses.

The mechanisms by which infants’ developing action systems impact their knowledge about objects are almost certainly a bi-directional one. Actions alter what infants attend to, perceive, and remember about objects, and their representations in turn contribute to what actions they perform on objects.

These findings contribute to our understanding of developmental changes in infants’ representation of different kinds of features in events involving actions on objects. In particular, infants’ representation of the features of such events is related to their activity with objects. Establishing this type of relation is key to understanding mechanisms of developmental change. These results contribute to our understanding of the complex relation between perception and action during infancy and may reveal the origins of how action and object identity are represented in adults.