Infant Sustained Attention During Parental Gesture

Unable to gather information and interact with their surrounding environment, young infants depend on their parent's hands to bring objects into view (Amano et al., 2004). Recent works have examined parental hand inputs as referential cues to objects for infants during play and suggested their effectiveness in shaping infants' visual experiences. However, these studies typically focus on object-handling behavior and we do not know how much of this effect is due to the object being handled or the hand action itself. Our study aims to (1) distinguish between object handling or the hand action itself to clarify the effects of hand action shaping infant visual experience and (2) examine which hand actions specifically illicit longer sustained attention (>1000ms). The obtained results show no significant differences between parental gesture and object handling in infants ages 4-12 months. However, when comparing average SA durations across age groups, a significant age effect on SA duration was found for parental object handling and symbolic gesture but not deictic gesture. This may suggest developmental differences in the ability of different age groups to fix attention in response to parental hand gestures. These findings may further develop into classroom-based and family-based interventions that effectively use specific hand gestures as tools to support early learning in children.