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Category: Project

Description: Parents and children appear to coordinate their attention to objects in their environment, often via mutual gaze. Children, however, display a novelty bias in interacting with objects, looking longer at novel objects relative to familiar objects. This may allow parents to follow in on their child’s focus of attention and label the novel objects, creating moments of optimal learning. The current study examined this with regard to whether children are more likely to lead instances of joint attention to novel relative to familiar objects and how they learn from periods of child-led or adult-led joint attention. In particular, we investigated whether (i) parents lead more instances of joint attention when playing with novel relative to familiar objects, (ii) parents preferentially label novel relative to familiar objects, and (iii) children's learning of novel word-object associations is affected by the frequency of labelling and children's sustained attention towards the objects. We found that not only do children lead more instances of joint attention, but, relative to their caregivers, children lead more instances of joint attention to familiar objects relative to novel objects. Parents also appeared to follow in on their child’s attention and labelled familiar objects more often than novel objects. Furthermore, we found no evidence for children’s recognition of the novel word-object associations. Our findings highlight the contingent nature of social interactions between caregivers and infants, with children leading and parents following their child’s lead, especially with regard to more familiar objects in the child’s environment.