Development of adaptive communication skills in infants of blind parents.

A fundamental question about the development of communication behavior in early life is how infants acquire adaptive communication behavior that is well-suited to their individual social environment, and how the experience of parent-child communication affects this development. The current study investigated how infants develop communication skills when their parents are visually impaired and cannot see their infants' eye gaze. We analyzed 6-min video recordings of naturalistic interaction between 14 sighted infants of blind parents (SIBP) with (a) their blind parent, and (b) a sighted experimenter. Data coded from these interactions were compared with those from 28 age-matched sighted infants of sighted parents (controls). Each infant completed two visits, at 6-10 months and 12-16 months of age. Within each interaction sample, we coded the function (initiation or response) and form (face gaze, vocalization, or action) of each infant communication behavior. When interacting with their parents, SIBP made relatively more communicative responses than initiations, and used more face gaze and fewer actions to communicate, than did controls. When interacting with a sighted experimenter, by contrast, SIBP made slightly (but significantly) more communicative initiations than controls, but otherwise used similar forms of communication. The differential communication behavior by infants of blind versus sighted parents was already apparent by 6-10 months of age, and was specific to communication with the parent. These results highlight the flexibility in the early development of human communication behavior, which enables infants to optimize their communicative bids and methods to their unique social environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).This work was supported by a UK Medical Research Council Career Development Award (G1100252), a UK Economic and Social Research Council Research Fellowship (RES-063-590 27-0207) and Wellcome/Birkbeck Institutional Strategic Support Fund to A.S., the BASIS funding consortium led by Autistica (http://www.basisnetwork.org), and a UK Medical Research Council Programme Grant (G0701484 and MR/K021389/1) to M.H.J. The work was affiliated to the BASIS network, which provided the testing protocol and the access to the control data

Cultural modulation of face and gaze scanning in young children

Previous research has demonstrated that the way human adults look at others’ faces is modulated by their cultural background, but very little is known about how such a culture-specific pattern of face gaze develops. The current study investigated the role of cultural background on the development of face scanning in young children between the ages of 1 and 7 years, and its modulation by the eye gaze direction of the face. British and Japanese participants’ eye movements were recorded while they observed faces moving their eyes towards or away from the participants. British children fixated more on the mouth whereas Japanese children fixated more on the eyes, replicating the results with adult participants. No cultural differences were observed in the differential responses to direct and averted gaze. The results suggest that different patterns of face scanning exist between different cultures from the first years of life, but differential scanning of direct and averted gaze associated with different cultural norms develop later in life

Early social experience affects the development of eye gaze processing

Eye gaze is a key channel of non-verbal communication in humans [1-3]. Eye contact with others is present from birth [4], and eye gaze processing is crucial for social learning and adult-infant communication [5-7]. However, little is known about the effect of selectively different experience of eye contact and gaze communication on early social and communicative development. To directly address this question, 14 sighted infants of blind parents (SIBP) were assessed longitudinally at 6-10 and 12-16 months. Face scanning [8] and gaze following [7, 9] were assessed using eye tracking. In addition, naturalistic observations were made when the infants were interacting with their blind parent and with an unfamiliar sighted adult. Established measures of emergent autistic-like behaviours [10] and standardized tests of cognitive, motor and linguistic development [11] were also collected. These data were then compared with those obtained from a group of infants of sighted parents. Despite showing typical social skills development overall, infants of blind parents allocated less attention to adult eye movements and gaze direction, an effect which increased between 6-10 and 12-16 months of age. The results suggest that infants adjust their use of adult's eye gaze depending on gaze communication experience from early in life. The results highlight that human functional brain development shows selective experience-dependent plasticity adaptive to the individual's specific social environment

Data from: Gaze-contingent reinforcement learning reveals incentive value of social signals in young children and adults

While numerous studies have demonstrated that infants and adults preferentially orient to social stimuli, it remains unclear as to what drives such preferential orienting. It has been suggested that the learned association between social cues and subsequent reward delivery might shape such social orienting. Using a novel, spontaneous indication of reinforcement learning (with the use of a gaze contingent reward-learning task), we investigated whether children and adults' orienting towards social and non-social visual cues can be elicited by the association between participants' visual attention and a rewarding outcome. Critically, we assessed whether the engaging nature of the social cues influences the process of reinforcement learning. Both children and adults learned to orient more often to the visual cues associated with reward delivery, demonstrating that cue–reward association reinforced visual orienting. More importantly, when the reward-predictive cue was social and engaging, both children and adults learned the cue–reward association faster and more efficiently than when the reward-predictive cue was social but non-engaging. These new findings indicate that social engaging cues have a positive incentive value. This could possibly be because they usually coincide with positive outcomes in real life, which could partly drive the development of social orienting

Summary datasets (main and supplementary data).

Excel document including three different datasets in separate sheets. The main dataset (dataset1) includes the participants' first looks towards the reward-predictive cue (analyses reported in the results section). The second dataset (dataset2) includes the participants' looking time at pre-test and post-test as well as other additional measures (analyses reported in the electronic supplementary material). Finally, the third dataset (dataset3) includes the ratings of the non-social stimuli, from a group of participants different from the participants taking part in the main experiment (analyses reported in the method section)

Infant neural sensitivity to eye gaze depends on early experience of gaze communication.

A fundamental question in functional brain development is how the brain acquires specialised processing optimised for its individual environment. The current study is the first to demonstrate that distinct experience of eye gaze communication, due to the visual impairment of a parent, affects the specificity of brain responses to dynamic gaze shifts in infants. Event-related potentials (ERPs) from 6 to 10 months old sighted infants with blind parents (SIBP group) and control infants with sighted parents (CTRL group) were recorded while they observed a face with gaze shifting Toward or Away from them. Unlike the CTRL group, ERPs of the SIBP group did not differentiate between the two directions of gaze shift. Thus, selective brain responses to perceived gaze shifts in infants may depend on their eye gaze communication experience with the primary caregiver. This finding highlights the critical role of early communicative experience in the emerging functional specialisation of the human brain

Relative visit duration between young and older children on the AOIs in (a) front eye, (b) back eye and (c) mouth during the entire period of stimulus presentation, for each cultural background and gender of the participants.

<p>Note. * p < .05 (corrected); error bar: standard error.</p

Relative visit duration on each AOI during the entire period of stimulus presentation, for each cultural background and gender of the participants.

<p>Note. * p < .05 (corrected); error bar: standard error.</p

Relative visit duration on the AOIs considered (front eye, back eye and mouth) for each 1-second bin of stimulus presentation, for each cultural background and sex of the participants.

<p>Note. (a) front eye, (b) back eye and (c) mouth. * p < .05 (corrected); error bar: standard error.</p

Sample of the gaze direction of the stimuli.

<p>All the actors initially showed (a) forward gaze and closed mouth. After one second, the actor shifted her gaze (b) toward the observer or (c) away from him/her. After another one second (i.e., 2 seconds from the onset of the stimulus), the face smiled (d and e). After that, the face remained still for another three seconds. The orientation of the face was right in half of the stimuli and the left in the other half.</p