Infants Track the Social Targets of Their Parents’ Gaze

A person’s gaze can be highly informative—it can reveal which people, objects, or places interest the person, and it can help observers predict what they might do next. It can also be difficult to understand. Relative to actions for which someone physically contacts a target (e.g., by reaching and touching), gaze may be difficult to understand because of the physical distance between the action and target. Indeed, classic research suggests that before 12 months of age, infants do not readily track the targets of others’ gaze. However, studies on the development of gaze understanding have mostly presented infants with unfamiliar adults acting on inanimate objects. Here, we provide evidence that 8- to 9-month-old infants can track the targets of their parents' gaze when that gaze was directed at a potential social partner: an animate puppet. When infants observed their own parents look toward an animate puppet, they expected them to continue looking towards the same puppet later. Infants did not have the same expectations when their parents looked toward inanimate objects, nor when they observed the gaze of an unfamiliar adult. Thus, before infants track the targets of object-directed gaze, they already track the targets of their parents’ social gaze. These findings are consistent with the possibility that social relevance shapes infants’ understanding of others’ actions.