title: Infant joint attention, neural networks and social cognition.
abstract: Neural network models of attention can provide a unifying approach to the study of human cognitive and emotional development (Posner & Rothbart, 2007). In this paper we argue that a neural network approach to the infant development of joint attention can inform our understanding of the nature of human social learning, symbolic thought process and social cognition. At its most basic, joint attention involves the capacity to coordinate one's own visual attention with that of another person. We propose that joint attention development involves increments in the capacity to engage in simultaneous or parallel processing of information about one's own attention and the attention of other people. Infant practice with joint attention is both a consequence and an organizer of the development of a distributed and integrated brain network involving frontal and parietal cortical systems. This executive distributed network first serves to regulate the capacity of infants to respond to and direct the overt behavior of other people in order to share experience with others through the social coordination of visual attention. In this paper we describe this parallel and distributed neural network model of joint attention development and discuss two hypotheses that stem from this model. One is that activation of this distributed network during coordinated attention enhances the depth of information processing and encoding beginning in the first year of life. We also propose that with development, joint attention becomes internalized as the capacity to socially coordinate mental attention to internal representations. As this occurs the executive joint attention network makes vital contributions to the development of human symbolic thinking and social cognition.
authors.affiliation: School of Education, Department of Psychiatry and the M.I.N.D. Institute, University of California at Davis, 2315 Stockton Blvd., Sacramento, CA 95817-9956, United States. pcmundy@ucdavis.edu
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mundy
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Jarrold
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology*; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D012919:Social Behavior