Whose gaze will infants follow? The elicitation of gaze‐following in 12‐month‐olds

Eighty‐three 12‐month‐old infants faced a noisy, active, object for one minute, after which the object turned 45 degrees to the left or the right. Five conditions explored what object features elicited gaze‐following behavior in the infants. In one condition, the object was an adult stranger. The other four conditions used a soft, brown, dog‐sized, amorphously‐shaped, asymmetrical novel object that varied along two dimensions theorized as central to the identification of intentional beings: facial features and contingently interactive behavior. Infants shifted their own attentional direction to match the orientation of the actor or object in every condition except the one in which the object lacked both a face and contingently interactive behavior. Infants’‘gaze’‐following behavior in general, therefore, appears to have been driven selectively by a particular configuration of behavioral and morphological characteristics, specifically those theorized as underlying attributions of intentionality rather than attributions of person per se.