Joint attention—when child and caregiver share attention to an object or location—is an important part of early language learning. Identifying when two people are in joint attention is an important practical question for analyzing large-scale video datasets; in addition, identifying reliable cues to joint attention may provide insights into how children accomplish this feat. We use techniques f...

To examine whether joint attention enables Japanese monkeys to imitate human actions, we presented an oral action and manual actions directed towards targets to three monkeys who had joint attention through communicative eye-gaze and pointing gestures and to one monkey who had incomplete joint attention and who had acquired imperative pointing but not the use of eye-gaze gestures. Two of the mo...

The goal of this study was to evaluate the degree to which measuring joint attention an aspect of social attention, is meaningful for the learning and development of preschool children. Joint attention refers to the executive capacity to coordinate visual attention with another person. This pivotal skill begins to develop from 6 to 18 months of age and continues to be refined and coordinated th...

BACKGROUND Delays and deficits in joint attention and symbolic play constitute two important developmental problems in young children with autism. These areas of deficit have been well studied in autism but have rarely been the focus of treatment efforts (see Kasari, Freeman, & Paparella, 2001). In this study, we examine the efficacy of targeted interventions of joint attention and symbolic pla...

Joint attention skills are an important part of human cultural learning. However, little is known about the emergence and meaning of these skills in early ontogeny. The development of, and relation among, various joint attention skills was assessed. Seventy-two 5 to 10-month-old infants were tested on a variety of joint attention tasks. Intercorrelations among these tasks were sparse, which put...

Joint attention has been identified as a foundational skill in human-human interaction. If virtual humans are to engage in joint attention, they have to meet the expectations of their human interaction partner and provide interactional signals in a natural way. This requires operational models of joint attention with precise information on natural gaze timing. We substantiate our model of the j...

Joint attention has been identified as a foundational skill in human-human interaction. In our research, we use virtual humans to evaluate cognitive models, here, enabling them to egage in joint attention. This requires an operational model with precise information on natural gaze timing. We aim at substantiating our model of joint attention (Pfeiffer-Leßmann & Wachsmuth 2009) by studying human...