When and where do infants follow gaze?

Abstract

Infants' processing of adult social cues develops late in the first year. Sensitivity before 6 months is limited to nonspecific motion-cuing by lateral eye movements. Results from naturalistic and experimental studies show that learning is sensitive to factors including target location, target salience, gaze-cue salience, and the presence of distractors or non-gaze social cues. Those results are consistent with models in which incremental learning processes gradually learn to predict interesting events in allocentric space, and spatial attention networks learn to integrate predictive cues and memory traces to plan searches in complex environments.