Infants Determine Others' Focus of Attention by Pragmatics and Exclusion

In the studies presented here, infants’understanding of others’attention was assessed when gaze direction cues were not diagnostic. Fourteen-, 18- and 24-month-olds wit-nessed an adult look to the side of an object and express excitement. In 1 experimen-tal condition this object was new for the adult because she was not present while the child and someone else played with it earlier. Children responded to this as if they as-sumed that the adult was excited about this new object as a whole. In the other condi-tion the object was one with which the infant and this adult had just previously played for a minute. In this case children appeared to assume that the adult could not be ex-cited about this object in itself. They responded either by attending to a specific part of the object or, more frequently, by looking around the room for another object. These results suggest that 1-year-olds can determine what others are attending to based on a pragmatic assessment of what is new and what is old for them combined with a form of reasoning by exclusion. There is much evidence that infants from 12 to 14 months of age understand that others see things. For example, they know that an adult will not be able to see a tar-get when he or she has his or her eyes closed or is wearing a blindfold (Brooks &