Senju, Atsushi and Vernetti, Angelina and Ganea, N. and Hudry, K. and Tucker, Leslie A. and Charman, T. and Johnson, Mark H. (2015) Early social experience affects the development of eye gaze processing. Current Biology 25 (23), pp. 3086-3091. ISSN 0960-9822.
![[img]](https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
Text
13036.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript Restricted to Repository staff only Download (982kB) |
|
|
Text
13036a.pdf - Published Version of Record Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (678kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Eye gaze is a key channel of non-verbal communication in humans [1-3]. Eye contact with others is present from birth [4], and eye gaze processing is crucial for social learning and adult-infant communication [5-7]. However, little is known about the effect of selectively different experience of eye contact and gaze communication on early social and communicative development. To directly address this question, 14 sighted infants of blind parents (SIBP) were assessed longitudinally at 6-10 and 12-16 months. Face scanning [8] and gaze following [7, 9] were assessed using eye tracking. In addition, naturalistic observations were made when the infants were interacting with their blind parent and with an unfamiliar sighted adult. Established measures of emergent autistic-like behaviours [10] and standardized tests of cognitive, motor and linguistic development [11] were also collected. These data were then compared with those obtained from a group of infants of sighted parents. Despite showing typical social skills development overall, infants of blind parents allocated less attention to adult eye movements and gaze direction, an effect which increased between 6-10 and 12-16 months of age. The results suggest that infants adjust their use of adult's eye gaze depending on gaze communication experience from early in life. The results highlight that human functional brain development shows selective experience-dependent plasticity adaptive to the individual's specific social environment.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD) |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Dec 2015 13:08 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:18 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/13036 |
Statistics
Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.
Archive Staff Only (login required)
