Eye Gaze Essay

In the process of human infants’ development, infants start to learn how to communicate with the others at the surprising early age, for example: Newborns can follow objects to make saccades to peripheral targets (Farroni et al., 2004);Infants’ responding eye gaze behaviour increase constantly since two months old (Scaife & Bruner, 1975); Cooper and Aslin pointed out that this preference showed up as early as the infants were one month old in 1990. Infants not only can respond to eye contact, vocal cues also are used for gaining more reference information during a communication, particularly when the speech is conducted forward to the infants. It had been reported in many studies that infants show more preference to infant-directed communication

Eye gaze is essential for evaluating the following objects: liking and attraction, attentiveness, competence, social skills and mental health, credibility, and dominance (Kleinke, 1986), these evaluations provide information about the target of another person’s attention and expression. Therefore, eye gaze helps to obtain information about communicative intentions and future behaviour (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Moreover, according to Patterson’s distinguish between communicative behaviours and indicative behaviours in 1982, only communicative behaviours are driven by a goal or purpose. Thus when infants are using eye gaze for communication, they are subjective to process the information transition. This statement also be demonstrated by many studies. For instance, D 'Entremont and his colleagues tested 24 infants form 3- to 6-month-olds in 1997 and they found that 73% participants followed the adults’ head-turn behaviour to change the direction of their eye

As a basic cognitive adaptation, natural pedagogy provides more evidences for infants’ sensitivity of ostensive signals. In the ostensive-referential communicative environment, by the active guiding of adults, infants have more opportunities to select the information they needed (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). When they face up to the challenge of ambiguous context, this natural pedagogy pattern will help them to learn general knowledge even social culture. Furthermore, consistent with the natural pedagogy theory, infants will apply this learning strategies to the new situation and every time when they are in contact with generalized information. In generally, this special information transfer pattern among human is beneficial for human infants to accumulate social knowledge and building general social norms. Evaluation The