title: Eye Contact Affects Object Representation in 9-Month-Old Infants.
abstract: Social cues in interaction with others enable infants to extract useful information from their environment. Although previous research has shown that infants process and retain different information about an object depending on the presence of social cues, the effect of eye contact as an isolated independent variable has not been investigated. The present study investigated how eye contact affects infants' object processing. Nine-month-olds engaged in two types of social interactions with an experimenter. When the experimenter showed an object without eye contact, the infants processed and remembered both the object's location and its identity. In contrast, when the experimenter showed the object while making eye contact with the infant, the infant preferentially processed object's identity but not its location. Such effects might assist infants to selectively attend to useful information. Our findings revealed that 9-month-olds' object representations are modulated in accordance with the context, thus elucidating the function of eye contact for infants' object representation.
authors: NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Kyoto, Japan.
authors: Yuko
authors: Y
authors: Okumura
authors: NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Kyoto, Japan.
authors: Tessei
authors: T
authors: Kobayashi
authors: Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.
authors: Shoji
authors: S
authors: Itakura
mesh_terms: D001519:Behavior; D005123:Eye; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D012919:Social Behavior