What leads to coordinated attention in parent-toddler interactions? Children's hearing status matters

Abstract

Coordinated attention between children and their parents plays an important role in their social, language, and cognitive development. The current study used head-mounted eye-trackers to investigate the effects of children's prelingual hearing loss on how they achieve coordinated attention with their hearing parents during free-flowing object play. We found that toddlers with hearing loss (age: 24-37 months) had similar overall gaze patterns (e.g., gaze length and proportion of face looking) as their normal-hearing peers. In addition, children's hearing status did not affect how likely parents and children attended to the same object at the same time during play. However, when following parents' attention, children with hearing loss used both parents' gaze directions and hand actions as cues, whereas children with normal hearing mainly relied on parents' hand actions. The diversity of pathways leading to coordinated attention suggests the flexibility and robustness of developing systems in using multiple pathways to achieve the same functional end.

Keywords: children with hearing loss; coordinated attention; eye-tracking; gaze following; parent-child interactions.

Fig. 1.

The two first-person views from the toddler’s and parent’s perspectives. The parent and child sat across from each other at a small table and played with 3 novel objects in each trial. Both participants wore a head-mounted eye-tracker, which was composed of an eye camera that recorded eye movements and a scene camera that recorded the first-person view. The cross-hair in each image indicates where the participant looked in the first-person view.

Fig. 2.

Representative time series of parent’s gaze, child’s gaze, parent’s hand contact and child’s hand contact. Coordinated attention was objectively defined as the temporal overlap between parent’s look at an object and the child’s look at the same object. A leading moment is the time in between the coordinated attention leader’s gaze onset and the follower’s gaze onset.

Fig. 3.

Proportion of face looks among all ROI looks. (A) Proportion of parents’ face looks in different groups. (B) Proportion of children’s face looks in different groups.

Fig. 4.

Histogram of coordinated attention episodes across groups.

Fig. 5.

Pathways parents used. (A) Proportion (and SE) of parents’ gaze following in child-led coordinate attention episodes. (B) Proportion and (SE) of parents’ hand following in child-led coordinate attention episodes.

Fig. 6.

Pathways children used. (A) Proportion (and SE) of children’s gaze following in parent-led coordinate attention episodes. (B) Proportion and (SE) of children’s hand following in parent-led coordinate attention episodes.

Fig. 7.

Temporal dynamics of children’s face looking behaviors prior to parent-led coordinated attention episodes. Each data point represent data from one frame prior to the onset (i.e., 33 ms, because the sampling rates of the cameras was 30 Hz). Error bars represent standard errors.