What's the point? Infants' and adults' perception of different pointing gestures

In this study, we used a spatial cueing paradigm on an eye tracker to investigate whether and to what extent adults and 12-month-old infants orient their attention in the direction of pointing gestures with different hand shapes: index finger, whole hand, and pinky finger. Furthermore, we assessed infants' and their parents' pointing production. Results revealed that adults showed a rel iable cueing effect: shorter saccadic reaction times (SRTs) to congruent than incongruent targets, for all hand shapes. However, they did not show a larger cueing effect triggered by the index or any other finger. This contradicts previous findings and is discussed with respect to the differences in methodology. Infants showed a cueing effect only for the whole hand but not for the index or pinky fingers. The current results suggest that infants' orienting to pointing may be more robust for the whole hand shape in the first year, and tuning in to the social-communicative relevance of the canon ical index finger shape may develop later or require additional social-communicative cues.
Source: Infancy - Category: Child Development Authors: Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research