Coordinating attention with another person on the same object, and knowing it is shared, underpins language learning and cooperation.
Scaife and Bruner reported in 1975 that infants follow an adult's gaze in the first year. The capacity is a precondition for word learning, since a label is useless unless learner and speaker are attending to the same thing, and its early absence is among the more reliable signals in developmental screening.
In practice
- A meeting where participants are looking at different documents produces agreement on different things.
- An instruction given while the other person is looking elsewhere has not been given.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind