Neural and Caregiver Contributions to the Development of Joint Attention

Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA

Investigators

Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The capacity to coordinate attention with others around a common point of reference, known as joint attention, is fundamental to human experience and critical to healthy human development in the social, cognitive, and linguistic domains. Existing research has demonstrated that joint attention skills emerge in the first year of life and vary meaningfully across infants. However, critical questions remain regarding how joint attention develops and what explains the individual variability in joint attention observed during infancy. Specifically, the neural mechanisms underlying joint attention as it emerges in early infancy are little explored or understood, and little work has examined how experiential factors such as caregiving can support infants’ joint attention. The overall objective of this application is to provide critical new insight into the mechanisms explaining the development of joint attention during infancy. In particular, this project aims to elucidate the neural and caregiving factors that contribute to infants’ ability to engage in joint attention during the first year of life. The central hypothesis is that infants’ emerging capacity for joint attention is explained by (1) early maturation, organization, and functional activation of a network of brain regions shown to support social understanding (i.e., the “social brain”), and (2) experience with contingent and responsive caregivers that directly scaffold joint attention skills and influence infants’ brain organization and function. To test this hypothesis, infant joint attention behavior, infant social brain activity, and naturally varying levels of mothers’ contingent, responsive caregiving will be observed longitudinally in a large sample of infant-mother dyads at two timepoints: age 4-5 months, when joint attention abilities are just emerging and the infant brain is particularly open to the influence of social experience; and age 11-12 months, when joint attention skills are more fully developed and vary meaningfully across infants. Infant social brain activity will be measured via EEG both when infants are ‘at rest’ (as an index of neuromaturation/organization of the social brain) and during real-time, naturalistic, joint-attentive interactions with the caregiver. The proposed research is innovative because it investigates developmental processes occurring early in the first year of life, and employs novel methods that assess infant behavior and brain activity in the naturalistic, social-interactive settings in which joint attention develops and is used. The proposed research is significant because it is expected to reveal the neural mechanisms underlying the emergence of joint attention and how contingent, responsive caregiving supports infants’ joint attention and brain development. Revealing these mechanisms will expand understanding of healthy child development and inform interventions for children at risk due to developmental disorders (e.g., autism) or altered caregiving environments (e.g., maternal depression, insensitive parenting) that influence social functioning in infancy.