Gaze Following and Agency in Human Infancy

Abstract

Abstract What role does gaze following play in infant social–cognitive development? This chapter draws conceptual distinctions between gaze following and other phenomena involving eyes. Gaze following changes with age. By 10 months of age infants attribute psychological states (perception, vision) to the adult gazer. New research using “social robots” helps isolate necessary and sufficient conditions for gaze following. The chapter also investigates mechanisms of developmental change and shows that infants use first-person experience as a basis for inferences about the perception of others. This supports the “like-me” account of social–cognitive development (Meltzoff, 2007, 2013), which holds that a building block of intentional understanding is infants’ agentive experience with their own bodies—including their own perceptual apparatus, its powers, and functions. Through experience with their own vision, infants come to understand others as psychological agents with visual experiences just “like me.” Crucially we also argue that self-experience is not unique: Infants’ observation of structured behavior of other agents also supports inferences about their psychological states such as vision.