Somewhere around 10 months of age, babies begin watching their parents’ eyes, following the direction of their gaze so that they can look at the same things.
It goes like this: Baby looks into mother’s eyes, mother looks at the kitty cat, so baby follows her gaze until they’re both looking at the kitty cat together.
That’s long been considered an essential skill for later social and intellectual development — and it’s one of the things doctors check for when diagnosing autism. But it has been unclear how the ability is linked to everything else unfolding in a young child’s brain.
Now researchers at the University of Washington are beginning to connect the dots between gaze-following at 10 months of age and skills that emerge later such as language and the ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective.
In a recent study, Rechele Brooks and Andrew Meltzoff of the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences followed a group of 19 children as they grew from infants to preschool age.
They discovered that children who were better at gaze-following as babies (10.5 months old) used more words that describe what’s going on inside their minds when they were toddlers (2.5 years old). And the toddlers who had used more words to describe thoughts, feelings and desires were better at discerning what others were thinking and feeling when they become preschoolers (4.5 years old).
The study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, shows significant associations between gaze-following and later skills, but it wasn’t designed to prove cause and effect.
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/...t-with-parents-gaze/
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