Comprehension of the manual pointing gesture in infants
Comprehension of the manual pointing gesture in infants
The experiments reported in this thesis were designed to study the development of infants' comprehension of the referential and spatial aspects of the manual gesture of pointing and its relationship to infant response to deictic gaze. The major findings are that infants under one year of age do not understand the signal value of their mother's pointing gesture since they are equally likely to fixate the gesturing hand as a salient object within their visual field. Fixation of a target when it does occur is a relatively slow, two-step sequence in which gaze is focused on the hand for a second or two before being redirected to the target. By contrast, older infants' gaze is directed swiftly to the indicated target. The results also demonstrate a basis for joint visual attention to objects and events within the infant's field of view: the addition of movement to one of two otherwise identical objects enables nine month infants to locate an indicated target directly. This `ecological mechanism', in the form of intrinsic attention-compelling features of the environment which capture the infant's attention, serves to complete the communicative function of the mother's change in direction of gaze and manual pointing. A further important finding was that from about twelve months, infants are not simply fixating the first salient object in their visual field, since they sequentially fixate two identical objects along their scan path in order to precisely locate the indicated target and by fifteen months they are able to ignore a mobile first object and directly fixate the second stationary target. This suggests that a new `geometric mechanism' is superimposed on the basic attentional process which enables the infant simultaneously to comprehend the referential nature of the pointing gesture and a change in another's direction of gaze.
University of Southampton
1988
Grover, Lesley Ann
(1988)
Comprehension of the manual pointing gesture in infants.
University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.
Record type:
Thesis
(Doctoral)
Abstract
The experiments reported in this thesis were designed to study the development of infants' comprehension of the referential and spatial aspects of the manual gesture of pointing and its relationship to infant response to deictic gaze. The major findings are that infants under one year of age do not understand the signal value of their mother's pointing gesture since they are equally likely to fixate the gesturing hand as a salient object within their visual field. Fixation of a target when it does occur is a relatively slow, two-step sequence in which gaze is focused on the hand for a second or two before being redirected to the target. By contrast, older infants' gaze is directed swiftly to the indicated target. The results also demonstrate a basis for joint visual attention to objects and events within the infant's field of view: the addition of movement to one of two otherwise identical objects enables nine month infants to locate an indicated target directly. This `ecological mechanism', in the form of intrinsic attention-compelling features of the environment which capture the infant's attention, serves to complete the communicative function of the mother's change in direction of gaze and manual pointing. A further important finding was that from about twelve months, infants are not simply fixating the first salient object in their visual field, since they sequentially fixate two identical objects along their scan path in order to precisely locate the indicated target and by fifteen months they are able to ignore a mobile first object and directly fixate the second stationary target. This suggests that a new `geometric mechanism' is superimposed on the basic attentional process which enables the infant simultaneously to comprehend the referential nature of the pointing gesture and a change in another's direction of gaze.
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Published date: 1988
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Local EPrints ID: 461091
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/461091
PURE UUID: 16e5816c-d1fa-4a9c-aec8-1ef03392f8dd
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Date deposited: 04 Jul 2022 18:35
Last modified: 04 Jul 2022 18:35
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Author:
Lesley Ann Grover
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