Shin, M. (2012). The role of joint attention in social communication and play among infants. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 10(3), 309-317.

Dr. Bradley's buzz:

This article identifies a gap in the literature when it comes to infant peer communication. The author's focus is on non-verbal social play, noting that there is a great deal of research on adult-infant interactions, but very little on infant-infant interactions.

The research took place in New York City over the course of a semester, and it involved 8 infants (4 boys, 4 girls) between the age of 6 weeks and 25 months.

The researcher found that infants began to engage in social interactions at around 9 months of age. She found that gazing, and being able to hold one another's gaze was the foundation of early social play. This gaze meeting then developed into gaze following as infants began to understand the intention behind the gaze of the other (e.g., looking over at a ball together).

Pointing was found to be object oriented but the researcher found that the children in her study were more interested in the other infant's interaction with the object rather than the object itself. Two types of pointing interactions were noted: pointing that is imperitative (e.g., requesting and object), and point that is declarative (e.g., drawing the other's attention to the object). In this study gesture was strongly linked to social play.

Conflict was also shown to take a positive role in social play. Although struggles were often over the ownership of objects and could lead to the end of the interaction, it was found that over time infant's strategies changed. This suggests that conflict can be a powerful tool for social learning leading to compromise and engagement.

These findings suggest that active observation is also a form of active participation in social relationships. The author points out that infants are highly capable of shared understanding long before they gain the ability to use verbal language. The upshot of this article is that infant caregivers need to be sensitive to the multiple meanings of behaviour, especially when it comes to the development of social communication.