Joint Attention Essay

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Joint attention is defined as coordination of attention between the self, the other, and some external object or event (Tomasello, 1995). Joint attention provides a way for infants to share experiences with others(). Around the age of 6-9 months, infants begin to develop joint attention when they engage in gazing or pointing to an object. The objective of joint attention is so that an adult can show interest in an object or event with an infant so that they can share communicative interplay. Joint attention is also related to other social behaviors like social referencing which refers emotional information from an unclear object or situation that is conveyed from adult to infant because the infant is now able to follow the adult’s attention. …show more content…

To do this, Flom and Pick had parents interact with their infants by looking, pointing, and verbally encouraging their infant to look at a specific object that was either familiar or unfamiliar to the child. The study involved using 18 month old infants and the conditions were broken up into three parts: only verbally telling the child to look at the object, only pointing and looking at the object, and both verbally telling the child to look at the object and pointing and looking as well (Flom & Pick, 2002). The hypothesis of the study was that adding verbal encouragement to a parent pointing and looking at an object would increase the likelihood of time an infant would engage in the object more because of joint attention. The results showed that adding verbal encouragement to pointing and looking did not promote longer joint attention in familiar or unfamiliar objects. They did however find that 18 month old’s tend to spend more time engaging in unfamiliar objects rather than familiar objects (Flom & Pick, 2002). Language is something that can be taught in various ways to infants. One of the ways of teaching it that corresponds to this study is when a parent uses parent-look and parent-gesture. This means that when a parent wants their child to look at something, they point to the object and name it. For instance, “Look Max, a puppy!” Instead of just

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