Social interactions serve as the primary training ground for many of a child’s positive cognitive and developmental abilities. Parent responsiveness has been identified as one key mechanism through which children gain more mature skills, but the question of how children elicit responses from their parents remains to be fully investigated. In this study, we utilized head-mounted eye trackers to track moment-by-moment shifts in gaze, manual action, and speech during parent-child toy play. This allowed us to identify the moments preceding a parent response and the type and timing of the parent’s response relative to the child’s behaviors. We found that child events of attention and action – where they were both touching and looking at a toy – were more successful in eliciting parent responses overall and in eliciting multimodal parent responses than events of just child look or child touch. The parent’s latency to respond to their child differed by event type and duration, suggesting that child behaviors influence parent responses. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Sustained attention (SA) is a critical skill in which a child is able tomaintain visual attention to an object or stimulus. The current studyemploys head-mounted eye trackers to study the cognitive processesunderlying SA by analyzing micro-level behaviors during parent-child social interactions in both typically and atypically developingchildren. Specifically, we examined the role of parent look, parenttouch, and child touch on SA duration. Results show that parent lookequally influences SA in both groups, while parent touch is morecritical for SA for TD children and the child’s own touching is morecritical for SA in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).Implications of different pathways to maintain SA between typicallydeveloping children and children with ASD are discussed.