Ger, Ebru; Wermelinger, Stephanie; de Ven, Maxine; Daum, Moritz M (2024). What's the point? Infants' and adults' perception of different pointing gestures. Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies, 29(2), pp. 251-270. Wiley 10.1111/infa.12579
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Adults and infants as young as 4 months old orient to pointing gestures. Although adults are shown to orient faster to index-finger pointing than other hand shapes, it is unknown whether hand shapes influence infants' perception of pointing. In this study, we used a spatial cueing paradigm on an eye tracker to investigate whether and to what extent adults and 12-month-old infants orient their attention in the direction of pointing gestures with different hand shapes: index finger, whole hand, and pinky finger. Furthermore, we assessed infants' and their parents' pointing production. Results revealed that adults showed a reliable cueing effect: shorter saccadic reaction times (SRTs) to congruent than incongruent targets, for all hand shapes. However, they did not show a larger cueing effect triggered by the index or any other finger. This contradicts previous findings and is discussed with respect to the differences in methodology. Infants showed a cueing effect only for the whole hand but not for the index or pinky fingers. The current results suggest that infants' orienting to pointing may be more robust for the whole hand shape in the first year, and tuning in to the social-communicative relevance of the canonical index finger shape may develop later or require additional social-communicative cues.
Item Type: |
Journal Article (Original Article) |
|---|---|
Division/Institute: |
07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Psychology 07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Psychology > Developmental Psychology |
UniBE Contributor: |
Ger, Ebru |
Subjects: |
100 Philosophy > 150 Psychology |
ISSN: |
1532-7078 |
Publisher: |
Wiley |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Pubmed Import |
Date Deposited: |
15 Jan 2024 14:51 |
Last Modified: |
06 Feb 2024 00:16 |
Publisher DOI: |
10.1111/infa.12579 |
PubMed ID: |
38214700 |
BORIS DOI: |
10.48350/191604 |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/191604 |
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