Joint Attention in Human and Chimpanzee Infants in Varied Socio‐Ecological Contexts

Joint attention (JA) is an early manifestation of social cognition, commonly described as interactions in which an infant looks or gestures to an adult female to share attention about an object, within a positive emotional atmosphere. We label this description the JA phenotype. We argue that charact...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 2021-12, Vol.86 (4), p.7-217
Main Authors: Bard, Kim A., Keller, Heidi, Ross, Kirsty M., Hewlett, Barry, Butler, Lauren, Boysen, Sarah T., Matsuzawa, Tetsuro
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Attention
Biodiversity
Caregiving
Child development
Children
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Colleges & universities
Cultural Differences
Decolonization
Definitions
Developmental Psychology
Emotions
Evolutionary theories
Families & family life
Farmers
Female
Genotype & phenotype
Humans
Infants
Middle Class
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Pan troglodytes - psychology
Peers
Play and Playthings
Primates
Resistance (Psychology)
Rural communities
Social classes
Social Cognition
Social Environment
Socialization
Young Children
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Summary:Joint attention (JA) is an early manifestation of social cognition, commonly described as interactions in which an infant looks or gestures to an adult female to share attention about an object, within a positive emotional atmosphere. We label this description the JA phenotype. We argue that characterizing JA in this way reflects unexamined assumptions which are, in part, due to past developmental researchers' primary focus on western, middle‐class infants and families. We describe a range of cultural variations in caregiving practices, socialization goals, and parenting ethnotheories as an essential initial step in viewing joint attention within inclusive and contextualized perspectives. We begin the process of conducting a decolonized study of JA by considering the core construct of joint attention (i.e., triadic connectedness) and adopting culturally inclusive definitions (labeled joint engagement [JE]). Our JE definitions allow for attention and engagement to be expressed in visual and tactile modalities (e.g., for infants experiencing distal or proximal caregiving), with various social partners (e.g., peers, older siblings, mothers), with a range of shared topics (e.g., representing diverse socialization goals, and socio‐ecologies with and without toys), and with a range of emotional tone (e.g., for infants living in cultures valuing calmness and low arousal, and those valuing exuberance). Our definition of JE includes initiations from either partner (to include priorities for adult‐led or child‐led interactions). Our next foundational step is making an ecological commitment to naturalistic observations (Dahl, 2017, Child Dev Perspect, 11(2), 79–84): We measure JE while infants interact within their own physical and social ecologies. This commitment allows us to describe JE as it occurs in everyday contexts, without constraints imposed by researchers. Next, we sample multiple groups of infants drawn from diverse socio‐ecological settings. Moreover, we include diverse samples of chimpanzee infants to compare with diverse samples of human infants, to investigate the extent to which JE is unique to humans, and to document diversity both within and between species. We sampled human infants living in three diverse settings. U.K. infants (n = 8) were from western, middle‐class families living near universities in the south of England. Nso infants (n = 12) were from communities of subsistence farmers in Cameroon, Africa. Aka infants (n = 10) were from foragi
ISSN:0037-976X
1540-5834
DOI:10.1111/mono.12435