Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The study of the coordination of attention, a term called jointattention (JA), has resulted in a better understanding of thedynamics and development of communication. Despite theimportant insights gained from studying JA, there is littleconsensus regarding the specific components that are included inoperationalizing JA. The present work explored a parameter spaceof JA during a dyadic naturalistic toy play task between 9-month-old infants and their parents. We systematically measured thetemporal properties of two components commonly used tooperationalize JA: the duration of continuous alignment of parentand infant visual fixations and the flexibility of fluctuations ofattention. The results show that very brief bouts of JA areimportant predictors for vocabulary development. The results fromthis work provide new insights into the specific properties used tooperationalize JA and point to the importance of consideringmultiple timescales of behavior that make up JA.