Emergence of Joint Attention:

Relationships Between Gaze

Following, Social Referencing,
Imitation, and Naming in Infancy
VIRGINIA SLAUGHTER
DANIELLE McCONNELL
School of Psychology
Universiv of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

ABSTRACT. The authors investigated the extent to which the joint-attention behaviors of
gaze following, social referencing, and object-directed imitation were related to each other
and to infants’ vocabulary development in a sample of 60 infants between the ages of 8
and 14 months. Joint-attention skills and vocabulary development were assessed in a lab-
oratory setting. Split-half reliability analyses on the joint-attention measures indicated that
the tasks reliably assessed infants’ capabilities. In the main analysis, no significant corre-
lations were found among the joint-attention behaviors except for a significant relation-
ship between gaze following and the number of names in infants’ productive vocabularies.
The overall pattern of results did not replicate results of previous studies (e.g., M. Car-
penter, K. Nagell, & M. Tomasello, 1998) that found relationships between various emerg-
ing joint-attention behaviors.
Key words: infant cognitive development, joint attention, theory of mind

BETWEEN THE AGES of 9 and 14 months, most infants begin to spontaneous-

ly exhibit joint-attention behaviors, including gaze following, object-directed imi-
tation, and social referencing. T h e significance of these behaviors has been debat-
ed, with two contrasting interpretations being offered. Rich interpretations ofjoint
attention argue that infants’ capacities for joint attention are conceptually linked,

This research was supported by a University of Queensland New Sraff Research Grant lo
thejirst author: We thank the parents and infants who generously rook time to participate
in this study. We thank Adam Breenfor assisrance with dara coding; Len Dalgleish for sta-
tisrical advice; and Judy Bowq, Mike Humphreys, and Berty Repacholi for valuable dis-
cussion. A portion of these &:a was presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for
Research in Child Development, Albuquerque, NM, April 1999.
Address correspondence to Virginia Slaughtes School of Psychology, University of
Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, 4072 Australia; vps @psy.uq.edu.au (e-mail).

54
 Slaughter & McConnell SS

as each joint-attention behavior is a manifestation of an underlying nascent

awareness of other minds (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Bretherton. 1992; Tomasello,
1995, 1999; Trevarthan & Hubley, 1978; Wellman, 1983). In contrast, lean inter-
pretations hold that each joint-attention behavior develops independently, through
specific learning mechanisms (Moore & Corkum, 1994).
The joint-attention behavior of gaze following has been the subject of much
recent study. Although under some conditions infants as young as 4 months old
have been shown to change their attentional focus in response to adults’ head and
eye turns toward objects (D’Entremont, Hains, & Muir, 1996; Hood, Willen, &
Driver, 1998), there is a general consensus that infants’ capacity to follow an
adult’s gaze, signalled by a head and eye turn, emerges on average at around I 1
to 12 months of age (Butterworth & Jarrett, 1991; Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasel-
lo, 1998; Corkum & Moore, 1998). The rich interpretation of gaze following
holds that infants turn their heads in order to see what another person is seeing.
This interpretation assumes that infants have some understanding that other peo-
ple are capable of looking and attending (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Caron, Krawkows-
ki, Liu, & Brooks, 1996; Tomasello, 1995).
Two alternative lean mechanisms have been offered to explain early gaze fol-
lowing. One is that infants learn to turn their heads in the same direction as other
people because when their head turning matches that of adults, it is typically
rewarded with interesting sights (Corkum & Moore, 1998; Moore & Corkum,
1994). This proposal has been supported by a series of experiments demonstrat-
ing that very young infants who do not yet spontaneously show gaze following
can be conditioned in the laboratory to follow the gaze of an adult, signaled by a
turning head (Corkum & Moore, 1998). Another lean mechanism that has been
offered for gaze following is that infants follow head turns because the stimulus
of a turning head releases an innate matching response (Corkum & Moore, 1995).
Neither of these lean interpretations of early gaze-following behavior attributes
to infants a recognition that other people are engaging in the mental activities of
looking and attending.
Those researchers who prefer a lean interpretation of gaze following do not
deny that eventually, gaze following may reflect infants’ or children’s recognition
of other people’s capacity to look and attend. Corkum and Moore (1995) proposed
that the nature of infants’ gaze following changes at around 18 months of age,
when infants begin to follow gaze on the basis of changes in eye direction alone.
Corkum and Moore (1995) argued that this developmental change, rather than the
initial emergence of gaze following in response to head turns, signals infants’ first
understanding that other people are capable of looking and attending.
The capacity to imitate actions on objects also emerges around the end of the
1st year of life (Piaget, 1962).The rich interpretation of object-directed imitation
holds that infants imitate in order to be like the modeler, and in so doing they
adopt the desires, goals, and intentions of the modeler (Carpenter et al., 1998;
Hay, Stimson, & Castle, I99 1; Tomasello, 1995). This interpretation therefore
S6 The Journul of Genetic Psychology

attributes to the infant some capacity to recognize the internal, mental states of
the modeler. Meltzoff ( 1995) provided strong evidence that older infants’ imita-
tive behavior involves attributions of goals and intentions when he showed that
18-month-old infants imitate intended but not completed object-directed actions
performed by a human model. Johnson, Booth, and O’Hearn (2001) found a sim-
ilar response in 15-month-old infants, when the model was a lifelike puppet. The
status of 12-month-olds’imitative behavior, however, is still debated (Tomasello,
Kruger, & Ratner, 1993).
The lean interpretation of imitation holds that infants attend to the actions of
the modeler, then attempt to replicate the spatiotemporal properties of the wit-
nessed action. Tomasello et al. (1993) referred to this behavior as emulation learn-
ing and noted that such behavior does not rely on an understanding of people and
their goals, in contrast to true imitation. Similarly, Uzgiris (198 1) distinguished
object-centered imitation from social imitation, and she argued that 16-month-
olds, but not 10-month-olds, imitate highly familiar actions on objects, perhaps
as a way of maintaining the social and communicative experience of imitating.
Social referencing has a long history of debate for rich versus lean interpre-
tations. Numerous studies have shown that around the end of the 1st year of life,
infants begin to modulate their behavior toward ambiguous situations in response
to emotional expressions of other people, typically their mothers, in experimen-
tal settings (Klinnert, 1984; Walden & Ogan, 1988). The rich interpretation of
social referencing is that infants respond to emotional displays on the basis of an
understanding that others are feeling positively or negatively toward the specific
objects or situations in question (Baldwin & Moses, 1994; Bretherton, 1992;
Repacholi, 1998).
The lean interpretations of social referencing include the mood contagion
hypothesis and an associative learning account. The mood contagion hypothesis
rests on the assumption that infants reflexively adopt the emotional state por-
trayed by other people. Thus, when infants’ mothers exhibit fear or disgust toward
an ambiguous object or situation, the infants catch the affective tone of the emo-
tion display and begin to experience that negative emotion themselves. As a result,
infants’ tendency toward exploration is inhibited. In the opposite situation, when
infants’ mothers exhibit pleasure, infants feeling the same way tend to explore
actively (Feinman, 1982). The other lean interpretation for social referencing is
that infant behavior is conditioned through the pairing of negative emotional
expressions and negative outcomes and positive emotional expressions and pos-
itive outcomes (Perner, 1991). Thus an infant may respond appropriately in
social-referencing situations without recognizing a relationship between his or
her mother’s affective display and the object about which she is emoting. Neither
of these lean interpretations of social referencing attributes to the infant an under-
standing of the internal, mental states that accompany the emotional displays.
One of the most obvious changes in infants’ behavior that occurs at the end
of the 1st year of life is the use of words. The significance of early words also
 Slaughter & McConnell S7

has had a long history of rich and lean interpretations. focusing in particular on
the extent to which infants’ first words are communicative, and therefore reliant
on a recognition of other people’s capacities for sharing attention, and receiving
and responding to communicative bids. A rich interpretation holds that infants
begin to produce words because they are attempting to change the attentional
focus, goal, or intention of the listener (Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, &
Volterra, 1979; Bruner, 1974/1975; Carpenter et al., 1998), whereas lean inter-
pretations attribute early word production to general learning niechanisms or mat-
uration of language-specific brain areas (reviewed in Pinker, 1993).
A related issue regarding the development of early vocabulary concerns the
extent to which infants are attributed with an understanding that speakers use words
to refer to specific objects (Baldwin & Moses, 1994; Carpenter et al., 1998).A rich
interpretation of infants’ early word comprehension and production is that infants
recognize the specific link between speakers’ referential intentions and the words
they utter (Baldwin, 1991, 1993a). A lean interpretation, in contrast, holds that
infants learn words simply on the basis of a contiguity between utterances and
objects and events (Whitehurst, Kedesdy, &White, 1982). Table I provides a sum-
mary of joint-attention behaviors and their rich and lean interpretations.
Our purpose in the present study was to investigate the extent to whichjoint-
attention behaviors are developmentally related in a sample of 8- to 14-month-
old infants, in order to find support for rich versus lean interpretations. Theoret-
ically, there are three alternative scenarios for the development of joint-attention
behaviors. One version of the rich interpretation hypothesizes that because all
joint-attention behaviors are manifestations of a nascent theory of mind, all joint-
attention behaviors should be developmentally linked. According to this view, the
nascent theory of mind would be seen to be both necessary and sufficient to drive
the development of joint attention; therefore, no joint-attention behavior would
be possible without the theory of mind underpinning. This scenario predicts that
the emergence of various joint-attention behaviors would occur in tandem and
that there would be strong developmental intercorrelations among the various
joint-attention behaviors.
Alternatively, the lean interpretation holds that individual joint-attention
behaviors develop independently through specific learning mechanisms. Accord-
ing to this view, the nascent theory of mind is neither necessary nor sufficient for
the development of joint attention, so there would be no reason to predict that the
various joint-attention behaviors would be developmentally related. The lean
interpretation predicts that each joint-attention behavior would rely on indepen-
dent underlying developments such as the learning of reinforcement contingen-
cies for gaze following and social referencing, specific perceptual and motor
skills for imitation, and brain and vocal tract maturation for early word produc-
tion. This scenario does not predict developmental intercorrelations among vari-
ous joint-attention behaviors.
A final possibility is that a combination of nascent theory of mind and
58 The Journul ofGenetic Psychology

TABLE 1
Rich Versus Lean Interpretations of Joint Attention Behaviors

Joint attention
behavior Rich interpretation Lean interpretation

Gaze following Infants look to see what Conditioning; head turn as

another person can see
(Baron-Cohen, 1995;
Tomasello, 1995)
Social
referencing Infants appraise object based
on another person’s feeling
state (Baldwin & Moses,
1994; Bretherton, 1992)
innate releaser (Corkum &
Moore, 1995)
Mood contagion (Feinman,
1982); associative learning
(Perner, 1991)

Imitation Infants adopt the intention/ Emulation learning

goal of another person (Tomasello, 1995;
(Tomasello, 1995) Tomasello et al., 1993)

First words Infants try to change another LAD maturation; associative

person’s attentional focus or learning (see Pinker, 1993)
goal by communicating
(Bruner, 197441975;
Carpenter et al., 1998)

Word learning Infants recognize speaker’s Infants pick up temporal

intention to refer to specific contiguities between words
objects and events (Baldwin, and objects/events
1991, 1993a) (W hi tehurst , Kedesdy,
& White, 1982)

specific cognitive and motor skills limits the development of individual joint-
attention behaviors. This scenario might be considered a weak version of the
rich interpretation, as infants’ recognition of others’ mental states is involved
in the production of joint-attention behaviors, but it is not the pacesetter for
the development of joint attention. According to this scenario, the nascent the-
ory of mind may be necessary for the emergence of joint-attention skills, but
it is not sufficient, because other underlying developments also would be
required for infants to produce joint-attention behaviors. This scenario, like
the lean interpretation discussed earlier, does not necessarily predict develop-
mental intercorrelations among various joint-attention behaviors.
There is some empirical evidence of developmental interrelations among
joint-attention behaviors at the end of the first year of life. Morrisette, Ricard, and
Gouin-Decarie (1995)performed a longitudinal study of the development of gaze
 Slaughter & McConnell 59

following and pointing and found a correlation between the development of the
two behaviors, although they provided a lean interpretation of their findings.
Morales, Mundy, and Rojas ( 1998) found that 6-month-olds’ gaze-following abil-
ity predicted their vocabulary development between 12 and 24 months. Mundy
and Comes (1998) found a developmental relationship between joint-attention
behaviors and language development in a longitudinal study of 14- to 18-month-
olds, though they failed to find relationships among the joint-attention behaviors
of gaze following and pointing. Siebert, Sliwin, and Hogan (1986) similarly
found developmental relationships between infants’ capacities to share attention
and their level of word comprehension. Finally, Harris, Barlow-Brown, and
Chasin ( 1995) showed that infants’ first pointing was closely correlated with their
first word comprehension. All of these studies can be seen as supporting a rich
interpretation of joint attention, because they demonstrate close developmental
relationships among emerging joint-attention behaviors.
The most comprehensive investigation of the emergence of joint attention to
date was carried out by Carpenter et al. (1998). They investigated the age of emer-
gence of a variety ofjoint-attention behaviors in a longitudinal study of 24 infants
older than 6 months. Their study revealed a developmental sequence for the emer-
gence of joint attention, namely, joint engagement (defined as coordinating look-
ing between an object and an interactive partner), followed by communicative
gestures, attention following (including gaze following). imitative learning, and
finally, referential language. They richly interpreted this pattern as reflecting
developmental levels in infants’ understanding of other people, with infants first
being able to share attention, then follow attentionhehavior, then direct atten-
tionhehavior. With respect to interrelationships among the various joint-attention
behaviors, their results showed modest but significant correlations between ages
of emergence of various joint-attention behaviors, although i n some cases the
intercorrelations were significant only when data from individual tasks were used
in the analyses (Carpenter et al., 1998, Study 1). Carpenter et al. argued from
these correlational data that the nature of infants’ basic concept of person changes
around the end of the 1 st year, and that the emergence of joint-attention behav-
iors reflects that fundamental change. Carpenter et al. also suggested however that
specific learning experiences are likely to contribute to the emergence of joint
attention in infancy.
The purpose of the present study was to further investigate developmental
relationships among joint-attention behaviors. The behaviors of social referenc-
ing, gaze following, and imitation were tested in a cross-sectional design with 60
infants. We were particularly interested in investigating whether and how social
referencing would be related to other joint-attention behaviors, because it has not
been included in previous investigations. To tap into infants’ earliest abilities, we
used the simplest versions available of the various joint-attention tasks. On the
basis of the findings of Carpenter et al. (1998) and others (Harris et al., 1995;
Mundy & Gomez, 1998; Siebert et al., 1986), we predicted that there would be
60 The Journul of Genetic Psychology

significant interrelationships among the various joint-attention behaviors under

study, supporting a rich interpretation of the emergence of joint attention.

Method

Pa rticipants

Sixty infants aged between 8 months 3 days and 14 months 17 days (M = 1 1

months, I7 days, SD = 50 days) participated in the study with their primary care-
givers. Infant participants were recruited through newspaper birth announce-
ments, flyers, and word of mouth. All infants were born at full term. Approxi-
mately 90% were Caucasian; there were 26 boys and 34 girls. The sample size
of 60 was set on the basis of a power analysis performed on the data from the
first 32 participants, which indicated that a sample of 60 would achieve an accept-
able power level of .8.

Procedure

Infants were brought to the laboratory where they were allowed to play and
warm up while caregivers were interviewed about infants’ language production
(see the Vocabulary section). Infants then completed three joint-attention tasks in
a single 30-min testing session. The order of presentation of the three tasks was
counterbalanced using a Latin Square design across infants.
The testing room was furnished with a central table, a high chair for the infant
on one side, and a chair on the other side where the experimenter or the infants’
caregivers sat while interacting with the infants. A video camera was positioned
out of the way in a corner of the room. When not interacting with infants, the
experimenter or the infants’ caregivers sat passively in a chair behind and to the
left of the infants’ high chair.

Gazefollowing task. For the gaze-following task, infants sat in the high chair
across the table from the experimenter. Infants participated in four looking trials
in which an experimenter gained the attention of the infant, then turned her own
head 60” to the left or right to fixate her gaze on an object (a small colorful Mr.
Men doll affixed to the wall at the infants’ eye level, approximately 2 m from the
infant) for 8 s. Two trials to the left and two to the right were presented, with order
randomized across infants. The video camera was positioned so that the experi-
menter’s head turns were not visible, but infants’ looking behavior was recorded,
to allow for unbiased coding of the data.

Social-referencing task. For the social-referencing task, infants watched their

caregivers, who expressed disgust and pleasure, alternatively, to two different
novel, ambiguous objects (a 26 cm high T-Rex model dinosaur and an ugly 26
 Slaughter & McConnell 61

cm high orange human-shaped action figure). The experimenter pretrained care-

givers on how to pose the required emotional facial expressions by allowing them
to follow a picture model and practice in front of a mirror. Infants and caregivers
sat across from each other at the table, and objects were presented individually,
out of reach of the infants, on the tabletop. Upon presentation of an object, care-
givers waited until infants looked to their faces, then uttered, “Oh, it’s a thing,”
in a voice that matched the emotional tone of the facial expression being posed
(pleasure or disgust). During the presentation of emotional messages in the social-
referencing task, the video camera was positioned so that caregivers’ faces were
visible, allowing the validity of their facial expressions to be checked later.
Two emotion displays were presented for each object. The presentation of
objects was counterbalanced for order and emotional tone across infants. Fol-
lowing the emotion displays, infants were placed on the floor equidistant from
the two objects and allowed to explore for 2 min. Infants’ behavior with respect
to the objects was videotaped.

Imitation rusk. For the imitation task, infants sat across the table from the exper-
imenter. Infants were presented with a novel toy and allowed to play with it for
a 30-s baseline period to establish their spontaneous actions with the object. After
the baseline period, the experimenter modeled a novel target action on the object.
The target action was modeled three times, then the object was returned to the
infant for a 30-s response period. Two objects were presented sequentially: a
dumbbell that could be pulled apart (following Meltzoff, 1995) and a short chain
that could be dropped inside a wicker jug. If infants spontaneously performed or
attempted to perform a target action during either baseline condition of the dumb-
bell or jug and chain, then they also were presented with a different chain that
could be hung on a peg. All infants thus completed two clean imitation trials, in
which there was no spontaneous performance of the target action before it was
modeled. Presentation of objects was counterbalanced across infants. Infants’
behavior with the objects during a 30-s response period was recorded.

Vocubulury. Caregivers listed all the words that infants both understood and said,
prompted with a list of common first words and word categories taken from the
MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Gestures ( 1993).
The full MacArthur was not administered because the majority of infants had only
two or three words (M vocabulary = 2.87 words, SD = 2.30, range = 0 to 9 words).

Coding and Scoring

Joint-attention task data were coded and scored by the second author, and 20%
of the data for each task was scored by an independent second observer to provide
reliability estimates. For each of the three tasks, both continuous scores and passlfail
scores were derived. The continuous scores were used in the correlational analyses
62 The Journul ofGenetic Psychology

(reported in the Results section). The padfail scores were used to explore poten-
tial developmental sequencing among the various joint-attention skills.

Gaze following. For the gaze-following task, infants were given 1 point for the
first look off the midline that they performed on each 8-s looking trial that
matched the experimenter’s direction of looking. Trials on which the infant mis-
matched the experimenter’s direction of looking or did not look off the midline
in either direction were given a score of 0.
Preliminary analyses indicated a bias in infant looking. There were signifi-
cantly more looks to the left than to the right across all looking trials, t(54) =
3.509,~ < .05, apparently caused by the placement of the camera, the seated care-
giver, or both in the rather cramped room during testing. To eliminate this con-
found, we included only the two looking trials that were presented in the direc-
tion away from the distractions in the analyses. Thus, any looks produced by
infants that matched the experimenters’ head turn were likely to have been per-
formed in response to the cue.
Interrater reliability for looking scores was 92%, with Cohen’s y = .89. A
total looking score was computed by adding infants’ scores for the two looking
trials, to give a score that ranged from 0 to 2. Infants were given credit for pass-
ing the gaze-following task if their total looking score was 2, indicating consis-
tent gaze following.

Social referencing. For the social-referencing task, infants were scored for which
object they touched first (score of 1 for the pleasure object, score of 0 for the dis-
gust object) and similarly for which object they played with the longest during
the 2-min response period. The two measures were summed to give a range of
scores from 0 to 2. The interrater reliability for both measures was 100%.Infants
were counted as passing the social-referencing task if they received a score of 2,
indicating a consistent preference for the pleasure object.
Two naive coders unassociated with the project rated the caregivers’ facial
affect as recorded on videotape during the emotion presentation phase of the
social-referencing task. This manipulation check confirmed that caregivers’ facial
expressions were appropriate for the assigned conditions, although one infant was
eliminated because his caregiver repeatedly used the word “yucky” while pre-
senting the disgust display. Three other infants touched neither object during the
response period, so those infants were unscorable and therefore not included in
analyses involving social referencing.

Imitation. For the imitation task, infants were given 1 point if they imitated the
experimenter’s action on the object within the 30-s response period, regardless of
whether the attempted imitation was successful (e.g., infants who tried to put the
chain in the jug but could not manage it because of a lack of manual dexterity were
still given credit for imitating). The scores for the two object tasks were summed
 Slaughter & McConnell 63

to give an imitation score that ranged from 0 to 2. The interrater reliability for imi-
tation scores was 93%, with Cohen’s y = 3 4 . Infants were counted as passing the
imitation task if their score was 2 or higher, indicating consistent imitation.

Vocabulary.The total number of words in infants’ vocabularies was divided into

two categories: (a) names, which included both object names (bottle, ball, and so
forth) and personal names (such as Mom and Dad); and (b) instrumental words,
which included relational words (more, gone, and so forth) and pragmatic func-
tors (such as bye-bye and ta).

Results
Task Reliabilities

Given the relatively low number of observations for each joint-attention task
because of time and infant-attention constraints, it was important to evaluate the
reliabilities of the various tasks. To do this, we assessed test-retest or split-half
reliabilites by computing Spearman rank order correlations for within-task mea-
sures. For gaze following, infants’ independent looking scores on Trials l and 2
were correlated, with p = .46, z = 3.47, p < .05. Although this relationship is only
modest, it does indicate that infants who followed gaze on Trial I were likely to
do so on Trial 2 as well, at greater than chance levels. For social referencing, the
two measures of first object touched and object played with the longest during
the response period were correlated, p = .71, z = 5.26, p < .Ol. For imitation,
infants’ imitation scores on the two tasks were correlated, p = .57, z = 4.37, p <
.01. These results demonstrate an acceptable level of internal consistency within
the joint-attention task measures and suggest that the measures reliably tap
infants’ capabilities.

Joint-Attention Task Performance

The proportions of infants passing the three joint-attention tasks were not sig-
nificantly different: 35% of infants passed the gaze-following task, 28% passed
the imitation task, and 41% passed the social-referencing task. With respect to the
vocabulary measures, the infants had an average of 2.30 names (SD= 1.94, range =
0 to 5) and an average of 0.57 instrumental words (SD = 0.98, range = 0 to 4).

lntertask Correlations

Given the nature of the scores, which ranged from 0 to 2 for the joint-atten-
tion tasks, and from 0 to 4 or 5 for the two vocabulary measures, nonparametric
contingency coefficients were the most appropriate statistic to use to estimate
associations among the joint-attention behaviors. However, we wanted to control
 TABLE 2
Pearson Correlation Matrix for Joint Attention Tasks and Vocabulary

Social Instrumental
Gaze referencing Imitation Names words
Con Con Con Con Con
Variable r coeff. r coeff. r coeff. r coeff. r coeff.

Gaze - -
Social referencing -. 18 1 .276 - -
Imitation .I33 .318 -.05 1 ,120 - -
Names .269* .307a -.014 .028 .009 .I69 - -
Instrumental words -098 .I38 -.116 ,237 -.O 14 ,059 .214* ,223 - -

Note. n = 60 in all cases except social referencing, where n = 56. Pearson correlations are controlled for age. Con coeff. = contingency coefficient.
ax2= 6.23, p < .05.
* p < .0s.
 Slaughter & McConnell 65

for age, so we decided to perform both parametric and nonparametric analyses

on the data set. We calculated Pearson product-moment correlations as well as
contingency coefticients to investigate the relationships among the various joint-
attention tasks. Age was partialed out of all the Pearson correlations. For calcu-
lation of the contingency coefficients, the vocabulary measures were
dichotomized to reduce low expected frequencies. As Table 2 illustrates, only one
significant relationship emerged: between the number of names in infants’ vocab-
ularies and their performance on the gaze-following task. This relationship was
significant in both types of analysis.

Developmental Sequencing

The patterns of p a d f a i l performance across the various joint-attention tasks

were examined. As Table 3 illustrates, no clear pattern emerged. To test for age
differences among the infants in the various p a d f a i l categories, we performed a
one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), with infant age as the dependent vari-
able and task performance categories as the independent variables. This analysis
was designed to uncover any developmental trends in infants’ performance; how-
ever, it should be noted that the number of infants in the performance categories
varied widely (from 14 infants passing only the social-referencing task to only 1
infant passing all three tasks; see Table 3) and the ns were quite small in some of
the cells. Although the results should, therefore, be interpreted with caution, this
analysis did reveal a main effect of age, F(7, 48) = 2.21, p < .05, indicating that
infants in the various performance categories vaned significantly in their average

TABLE 3
Number of Infants Passing Joint Attention Tasks and
Mean Ages of Infants in Each Performance Category

Mean age
SD
Pattern n Months Days (days)

Fail all 3 tasks II 11 21 56.7

Pass gaze-following only 10 12 12 43.2
Pass social reference only 14 10 14 38.5
Pass imitation only 7 12 7 43.9
Pass gaze + imitation 3 11 18 28.0
Pass gaze + social reference 5 12 0 21.1
Pass social reference + imitation 5 12 13 34.3
Pass all 3 1 14 17

Nore. N = S6 because 4 infants did not respond in the social referencing taqk.
66 The Jvurnul of Generic Psychology

ages. Post hoc Fisher’s least significant difference (Pairwise Least Significant
Difference) tests indicated that the infants who passed only the social-referenc-
ing task were significantly younger than infants in all the other categories, except
those who passed both gaze following and imitation (all p s c .05). The number
of infants passing zero, one, two, and three of the three joint-attention tasks was
11, 31, 13, and 1, respectively.

Discussion

The results of this study were surprising because there was no evidence that
infants’ capacities to engage in various joint-attention behaviors were develop-
mentally related, in contrast to findings of previous studies (Carpenter et al.,
1998; Morisette et al., 1995). There are two methodological reasons that could
explain why this study did not reveal correlations among the various joint-atten-
tion behaviors. First, the young ages of the infants restricted the number of trials
that could be performed for each task. As a result, the data may have suffered
from a lack of robustness and reliability. Furthermore, the scores that were
entered into the correlational analyses had restricted ranges, so there was little
variability from which significant correlations could emerge. With these caveats
in mind, it is worth noting that the generally null results of the present study were
not attributed to ceiling or floor effects in the data because approximately half of
the infants passed each of the joint-attention tasks. Also, the within-task correla-
tions used to establish task reliabilities, although not high, were significant, sug-
gesting that even with as few as two trials per task, infants’ performance was accu-
rately measured. Finally, as stated earlier, the sample size in the present study was
determined by a power analysis that indicated a sample size of 60 would achieve
an acceptable power level of .8.
The main correlational findings in this study are in contrast to those of Car-
penter et al. (1998), who found modest interrelationships among the joint-atten-
tion behaviors of attention following (gaze following and point following com-
bined), imitation, and referential language. Those authors used a different
dependent variable, namely age at onset of the various joint attention behaviors,
which may account for the disagreement between the studies.
Despite the disagreement between the correlational results of the two stud-
ies, some of the present results may be interpreted as supporting the develop-
mental sequence proposed by Carpenter et al. (1998). Although no clear devel-
opmental pattern emerged in the data, we did find that the infants who passed the
social-referencing task were significantly younger than those who passed the imi-
tation task. Carpenter et al. (1998) found that infants passed their social-obstacle
task, which was similar to a social-referencing task in that infants looked to an
adult in response to an ambiguous situation, earlier than the other joint-attention
tasks. Carpenter et al. (1998) found further that the imitative learning emerged
later than the other joint-attention behaviors. Thus, there may be a reliable order
 Slaughter & McConnell 67

of emergence of joint-attention behaviors, which deserves further study. Although

Carpenter et al. ( 1998) richly interpreted the developmental sequencing among
joint-attention behaviors as indicators of more and more complex understandings
of people as intentional and mindful, the lack of association between joint-atten-
tion behaviors in the present study highlights the possibility that any develop-
mental sequence found among joint-attention behaviors may be better explained
by the lean interpretation, in which developmental requirements of specific, inde-
pendent skills are responsible for the development of joint attention.
The pattern of results in the present study provides little insight into the
debate about rich versus lean interpretations of joint attention. However, the lack
of association among joint-attention behaviors does challenge the rich interpre-
tation, articulated earlier, i n which a nascent theory of mind is both necessary and
sufficient for the development of joint attention. Thus, one of the other two sce-
narios is likely to be correct: a nascent theory of mind is necessary but not suffi-
cient for the emergence of joint attention, or the emergence of joint attention is
not a reflection of a nascent theory of mind. The correlational approach cannot
distinguish between these two possibilities; however, there are some relevant
experimental data. For instance, Corkum and Moore (1998) demonstrated that
young infants who did not yet spontaneously follow gaze could be conditioned
to produce gaze-following behavior in the laboratory. This suggests that gaze-fol-
lowing, joint-attention behavior can emerge simply on the basis of lean mecha-
nisms, without there being an underlying theory of mind.
Looking at Table 2, one can see that the pattern of data for the correlation
coefficients and the partial Pearson correlations appears to be somewhat differ-
ent. The nonparametric correlation coefficients show nonsignificant but positive
relationships among some of the joint-attention behaviors; however, only the rela-
tionship between gaze following and production of names was significant. When
the Pearson correlations are examined, the overall pattern of associations looks
quite different, probably because the Pearson correlations have age partialed out.
However, the only significant relationship among the joint-attention behaviors is
between gaze following and comprehension of names. Thus, the gaze and names
relationship, while modest, is fairly robust.
The finding that infants’ tendency to follow an adult’s gaze was positively
related to the number of names they produced is consistent with other published
studies that have linked early gaze following ability with later vocabulary
(Morales et al., 1998) and have linked joint attention and word comprehension
(Siebert et al., 1986) and gaze following and language development in older
infants (Mundy & Gomes, 1998). This result also supports Carpenter and col-
leagues (1998) finding of significant relationships between 12- to 24-month-old
infants’ capacities for joint engagement and attention following, and their pro-
duction of words. The present results add two points to the established literature:
first, the ability to follow gaze was related to young infants‘ production of names,
but not to their production of other types of words, and second, the relationship
68 The Journul of Genetic Psychology

between gaze following and number of names in the vocabulary was found to be
present in infants as young as 8 to 14 months old. Taken all together, these cor-
relational findings suggest that beginning early in the 2nd year of life, the capac-
ity to follow gaze positively influences infants’ ability to learn names for specif-
ic objects. Thus, infants as young as 8 months old may utilize their ability to
follow gaze to determine specific reference in word learning situations. Such a
mechanism for word learning has been experimentally demonstrated in 18 month
olds, but not in younger infants (Baldwin, 1991, 1993b).
The results of the present study revealed no relationship between the joint
attention behaviors of gaze following and social referencing. Many authors have
argued that infants’ ability to interpret another’s emotional messages relies on
their being able to determine the referent of the message, in the same way that
interpreting language requires the ability to determine reference (Baldwin, 1995;
Baldwin & Moses, 1994; Bretherton, 1992; Walden & Ogan, 1988), and there is
some evidence that infants as young as 12 months old can utilize adults’ atten-
tional focus to identify specific referents of emotional messages in social-refer-
encing situations (Moses, Baldwin, Rosicky, & Tidball, 1998). Given the rela-
tionship obtained between gaze following and names in infants’ vocabularies, we
were surprised to find that infants’ capacity to follow gaze was not related to their
performance on the social-referencing task. Our task was constructed such that
infants were not required to follow their caregiver’s gaze in order to link the emo-
tional message with the relevant object; thus, infants could pass the social-refer-
encing task using a simple association strategy. A more complex social-referenc-
ing task, in which infants are required to locate the specific referent of an
emotional message, might be developmentally related to infants’ gaze-following
ability. The present result, however, demonstrates that infants’ basic ability to
appraise ambiguous situations on the basis of adults’ specific emotional messages
is not developmentally related to other joint-attention behaviors.
There is no doubt that the behaviors of joint attention that are achieved by
infants at the end of the 1st year of life allow them to engage in relatively com-
plex social-communicative interactions. The question is, do these joint-attention
behaviors all emerge as a result of infant’s having a nascent theory of mind, or
alternatively, do the behaviors themselves enable the infant to begin to develop
an understanding of mind? The results of the present study suggest that a nascent
theory of mind may be necessary, but is not sufficient, for the initial emergence
of joint-attention behaviors at the end of the 1st year of life. Rather, the pattern
of results from the present study suggests that joint-attention behaviors are more
likely to emerge independently, as infants acquire the relevant lean mechanisms
that support them. The question then becomes, at what point do these individual
joint-attention tasks reflect infants’ having an understanding of mind? It is still
possible that a nascent theory of mind is necessary for the development of joint
attention, along with other cognitive and behavioral developments. It is worth not-
ing, however, that a good deal of current research points to 18 months old as the
 Slaughter & McConnell 69

age at which infants can first be said to possess an understanding of the mental
states of others (Butler, Caron, & Brooks, 1999; Corkum & Moore, 1995; Melt-
zoff, 1995; Moore, 1996; Repacholi, 1998; Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997). T h e find-
ings of these studies suggest that a fruitful avenue of future research would be to
conduct longitudinal investigations of the ways in which infants’ joint-attention
behaviors develop through the first half of the 2nd year of life.

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Received M a y 29, 2002