Empirical Article
Hand–Eye Coordination Predicts Joint Attention
Chen Yu,
Linda B. Smith,
Corresponding Author
Chen Yu
Indiana University
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Chen Yu, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University, 1101 East 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected].Search for more papers by this authorChen Yu,
Linda B. Smith,
Corresponding Author
Chen Yu
Indiana University
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Chen Yu, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University, 1101 East 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected].Search for more papers by this authorWe thank Melissa Elston, Steven Elmlinger, Charlotte Wozniak, Melissa Hall, Charlene Tay, and Seth Foster for collection of the data, and Tian (Linger) Xu, Seth Foster, and Thomas Smith for developing data management and processing software. This work was funded by National Institutes of Health Grant R01HD074601 and R21 EY017843.
Abstract
The present article shows that infant and dyad differences in hand–eye coordination predict dyad differences in joint attention (JA). In the study reported here, 51 toddlers ranging in age from 11 to 24 months and their parents wore head-mounted eye trackers as they played with objects together. We found that physically active toddlers aligned their looking behavior with their parent and achieved a substantial proportion of time spent jointly attending to the same object. However, JA did not arise through gaze following but rather through the coordination of gaze with manual actions on objects as both infants and parents attended to their partner's object manipulations. Moreover, dyad differences in JA were associated with dyad differences in hand following.
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