a new look at gaze: preschool children's understanding of eye-direction

Cognitive Development, 14, 549–571 (1999) © 2000 Elsevier Science Inc.ISSN 0885-2014 All rights of reproduction reserved.

Manuscript received June 10, 1998; revision accepted August 17, 1999 549

A New Look at Gaze: Preschool Children’sUnderstanding of Eye-Direction

Martin J. DohertyJames R. Anderson

Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland

This study challenges the consensus view that children can judge what some-one is looking at from infancy. In the first experiment 2-, 3-, and 4-year-oldchildren were asked to judge what a person in a drawing was looking at andwhich of two people was “looking at” them. Only 6% of 2-year-olds andyoung 3-year-olds passed both gaze-direction tasks, but over 70% passed ananalogous point-direction task. Most older 3-year-olds and 4-year-oldspassed all three tasks. Experiment 2 compared children’s ability to judgewhat the experimenter was looking at with performance on the picture tasks.Three-year-olds performed significantly worse than 4-year-olds on the reallife and picture gaze tasks. Performances on the two types of gaze task werehighly correlated. Experiment 3 included stimuli with the additional cue ofhead-direction. Even the younger children performed well on these stimuli.These results suggest that, regardless of task format, children cannot judgewhat someone is looking at from eye-direction alone until the age of 3 years.Weaknesses in the evidence supporting the consensus view are highlightedand discussed.

This study concerns children’s ability to understand gaze, that is, the ability torepresent gaze-direction, a relation between a person’s eyes and an object. Thisskill is of interest because it is clearly related to the understanding of perceptionand attention, which plays an important role in theories of the development of so-cial cognition and the child’s theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Moore & Cor-kum, 1994; Povinelli & Eddy, 1996). Children might represent this relation asperceptual (e.g., as an attentional relation) or merely physical (e.g., as a geomet-

This work was supported in part by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council,R000222513.

Direct all correspondence to: Dr. Martin Doherty, Department of Psychology, University of

Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland; E-mail: [email protected]

550 Doherty and Anderson

rical relation); for present purposes we want to find out whether they represent itat all.

Driving most theory and empirical investigation in this area has been the plau-sible assumption that children understand gaze-direction from before the age oftwo years. Several lines of research appear to converge to show that gaze-under-standing develops throughout the first two years and is firmly in place thereafter(Butterworth & Jarrett, 1991; Baron-Cohen, Campbell, Karmiloff-Smith, Grant& Walker, 1995; Lempers, Flavell, & Flavell, 1977). This impression is mislead-ing, however, being based on disparate types of data from different age groups ofchildren. Whereas experiments done with older children probably do demon-strate genuine gaze understanding, this is not necessarily the case for experimentsdone with younger children.

Infancy research shows that when an adult breaks off mutual gaze and turnsher head to look elsewhere, infants can follow the adult’s gaze from the age of 12months, and possibly earlier (Scaife & Bruner, 1975; Butterworth & Jarrett,1991; Corkum & Moore, 1995). By the age of 18 months children may be able todo this on the basis of eye-movement cues alone (Butterworth & Jarrett, 1991;Corkum & Moore, 1995). This skill may be present in some form much earlier.Hood, Willen, & Driver (1998) have shown that when the adult’s head (presentedon a video screen) makes an eye-movement to one side and then is made to dis-appear, children as young as 3 months tend to orient in the direction of the eye-movement.

On the basis of these types of evidence, some authors argue that children un-derstand attention (e.g., Butterworth, 1991) or even that children understand thatthey and the adult are both attending to the same thing (Baron-Cohen, 1995; To-masello, 1995). However, others point out that the data only indicate the abilityto use cues such as eye-direction and head posture to orient towards the object ofanother’s gaze; infants do not necessarily understand the attentional relation indi-cated by these cues and the object, or represent the relation at all (e.g., Moore &Corkum, 1994; Povinelli & Eddy, 1996). This simple orienting response could beinnately specified, or it could arise through instrumental conditioning. For exam-ple, when the mother looks away, the child is distracted from the interaction andalso looks elsewhere. Because looking in the same direction as the mother tendsto be rewarded with an interesting sight, over time this head turn response be-comes conditioned (Moore & Corkum, 1994).

Little other work addresses the development of gaze understanding in infancy.Vecera and Johnson (1995), using preferential looking techniques, found that4-month-old children could discriminate between infant-directed and avertedgaze in photographs. Similarly, it has been shown that 5-month-old infants smilemore when another person makes eye contact with the child than when the otherperson looks at a nearby location (Lasky & Klein, 1979). Although interesting,these kinds of data do not show that children understand someone is looking atthem. A face gazing at the observer is a very particular kind of stimulus, a rea-

A New Look at Gaze 551

sonably reliable indicator of social engagement. One might therefore expect in-fants to be sensitive to this particular stimulus from an early age without neces-sarily representing the observer’s gaze.

On the other hand, data from 4-year-old children provide good evidence thatchildren of this age understand gaze. Baron-Cohen, et al. (1995) found that 4-year-old children could tell which of two people (in a line-drawing picture) was “look-ing at” them, or which of four targets a line drawing face was looking at. Each ofthese skills plausibly requires children to represent the person’s eyes, the target(themselves or an object) and the relation between the two.

Unfortunately, there are few data concerning younger children’s ability tojudge what someone else is looking at. Baron-Cohen and Cross (1992) found that3-year-olds were significantly worse than 4-year-olds at stating which of twopeople in a photograph was looking at them, although still better than chance(75% versus 94% trials correct). Similarly, Anderson and Doherty (1997) askedchildren of mean age 3 years 7 months to judge which of two people in a photo-graph was looking at a nearby target. Although above chance, the 85% correct re-sponse performance was surprising given the accepted view that gaze under-standing is firmly in place before the age of 2 years. Data concerning 2-year-oldchildren’s explicit judgments of another’s gaze are scarce and difficult to assess.In an often-cited study, Masangkay, McCluskey, McIntyre, Sims-Knight,Vaughn, & Flavell (1974, Expt. 1) found a majority of 3-year-olds (7 out of 9)but a minority of 2-year-olds (6 out of 16) were able to consistently identifywhich of several objects an experimenter was looking at. This suggests that theability to judge another’s gaze is not fully developed until the age of roughly 3years. Lempers, et al. (1977), using a modified version of this procedure foundthat 7 out of 12 children around the age of 2 years, 7 out of 12 children around theage of 2 years 5 months, and 11 out of 12 children around the age of three yearsone month were able to tell which of three objects an experimenter was lookingat. Taken at face-value, Lempers et al.’s results suggest that by the age of 2 years,just over half of children can judge another’s gaze. However, the authors did notreport the number of trials administered, the number of successful trials neces-sary to pass the task, or the number of sessions (tasks were sometimes adminis-tered several times). Further, this task may be prone to false positives. For exam-ple, in Masangkay et al.’s study, the objects were placed around the child suchthat if the child looked at any one object then the others were excluded from thevisual field. Simply orienting on the basis of the experimenter’s gaze wouldtherefore make the correct target much more salient than the others (which wouldbe invisible) and could lead to success on this task.

To sum up research to date on children’s understanding of gaze-direction: In-fancy studies have shown that children below 2 years can distinguish direct andaverted gaze and orient themselves to follow another’s gaze, but neither of theseabilities require infants to represent the link between a person’s eyes and the ob-ject of the person’s attention. Studies using line drawings or pictures have shown


that 4-year-olds are proficient at judging gaze, and 3-year-olds are above chancebut not perfect. Studies with real people looking at objects have shown that most3-year-olds and a minority of 2-year-olds can judge what an experimenter islooking at (Masangkay et al., 1974), while one study suggests that very young2-year-olds can judge what an experimenter is looking at (Lempers et al., 1977).The small amount of data concerning 2-year-olds is equivocal. If 2-year-oldswere found to be unable to judge gaze, it would suggest that their gaze followingis not based on gaze understanding. Conversely, if 2-year-olds were found to beable to judge gaze, it would add strength to claims that infants genuinely under-stand gaze.

E

XPERIMENT

1

The aim of Experiment 1 was to look at how the ability to make judgments ofgaze from pictorial stimuli develops, adapting stimuli used by Baron-Cohen et al.(1995). So far these types of stimuli have only been administered to 4-year-oldsfor people looking at objects, and 3-year-olds for people “looking at” the viewer.In Experiment 1 both types of stimuli were administered to 2-, 3-, and 4-year-oldchildren. The results of Baron-Cohen and Cross (1992) and Anderson andDoherty (1997) suggest that 3-year-olds are less proficient at making these kindsof judgment than 4-year-olds. This may be because gaze understanding only de-velops around the child’s third birthday. As a control for potential difficultieswith the test question and more general aspects of the task we used a task analo-gous to one in which children had to judge what someone was looking at, withthe face replaced by a small figure pointing at one of the targets.

Method

Participants.

Thirty-six children (18 girls and 18 boys) took part in the ex-periment. They came from a predominantly middle-class nursery school inStirling, Scotland. For the purposes of analysis the children were divided intotwo groups: a younger group (18 children from 2 years 5 months to three yearstwo months, mean age 2 years 10 months, SD

5

3 months) and an older group(18 children from 3 years 3 months to 4 years 9 months, mean age 4 years 1month, SD

5

5 months).

Design.

Each child was tested on four tasks: Looking-at-you, Looking-where, Point-direction, and an additional picture task not dealt with here. The or-der of administration was counterbalanced in a 4 x 4 sequence-balanced Latinsquare design. Each task comprised four trials which were administered in afixed sequence.

Procedure.

Looking-at-you.

The child was presented with a 21 x 18 cmsheet with two schematic line-drawing faces as shown in Figure 1a. The childwas asked “Which one is looking at you?”. The question was repeated with three


more pictures in which the correct face was on the left, left, and right, respec-tively. The incorrect face gazed away from the correct face in half the pictures.

Looking-where.

The child was presented with a schematic line drawing of aface gazing at one of four colored shapes, as shown in Figure 1b. The child was

Figure 1. Examples of stimuli for the picture gaze-direction and Point-directiontasks. In the originals of Figures 1b and 1c the objects were each of a different color.


asked “Which one is Sam looking at?”. The question was repeated with threemore pictures in which the only difference was that gaze-direction was to the bot-tom-left, top-left, and bottom-right, respectively.

Point-direction.

The child was presented with a schematic line drawing of aman pointing to one of four shapes, as shown in Figure 1c. The child was asked“Which one is Sam pointing at?” The question was repeated with three more pic-tures in which the only difference was that Sam pointed to the top-left, bottom-left, and top-right, respectively.

Scoring.

For all tasks children were required to respond by pointing. If chil-dren named the shape or the color they were encouraged to point as well. Be-cause the Looking-where and Point-direction tasks have 4 potential targets andthe Looking-at-you task allows only 2 potential choices, the chance of successthrough guessing alone differs between tasks. To allow direct comparison of per-formance, children were scored as passing or failing tasks as follows: The crite-rion for success on the Looking-where and Point-direction tasks was three or fourout of four items correct. For the Looking-at-you task, the criterion was four outof four items correct. The probability of choosing the target from four alterna-tives on at least three occasions, or choosing correctly between two alternativeson all four occasions by guessing alone, is the same:

p

5

0.0625.

Results

Figure 2 shows the number of children in each age group reaching criterion onthe three tasks. As can be seen, performance on the Point-direction task was goodfor both age groups, with 13 out of 18 younger children correctly identifying allfour targets, and all 18 older children doing so. This difference is small but sig-nificant: Fisher’s exact,

p

5

.0227. Performance on the gaze-direction tasks waspoorer and showed a more marked age effect. Of the younger group, only two3-year-olds passed the Looking-where task (11%), only one of whom passed theLooking-at-you task (5.5%). Of the older group, 83% passed the Looking-wheretask and 61% passed the Looking-at-you task. This age improvement is highlysignificant for both tasks: Fisher’s exact,

p

,

.001 in both cases.The two gaze direction tasks were substantially and significantly positively

correlated,

r

5

.63,

p

,

.001. This correlation remained significant when age waspartialled out,

r

5

.40,

p

5

.017. By contrast, correlations between performanceon the Point-direction task and each gaze-direction task were low: the correlationbetween Point-direction and Looking-at-you,

r

5

.28; between Point-directionand Looking-where,

r

5

.38,

p

,

.05.Performance on the Point-direction task was superior to performance on either

gaze task: 19 children passed the Point-direction and failed the Looking-at-youtask, and no child showed the opposite pattern,

p

,

.001 (Binomial test); 14 chil-dren passed the Point-direction and failed the Looking-where task, and no childshowed the opposite pattern,

p

,

.001. The two gaze tasks did not differ signifi-


cantly: 6 children passed the Looking-where task and failed the Looking-at-youtask, and 1 child showed the opposite pattern.

It is possible that some children were partially correct in the Looking-wheretask, for example, correctly judging that gaze was to the left side but incorrectlychoosing the top rather than the bottom object. In order to assess this possibility,children’s incorrect responses were coded either as correct on one dimension –left/right or top/bottom – or as incorrect on both dimensions (e.g., bottom leftwhen the target was top right). Random responding would mean that responsesincorrect on only one dimension would be twice as frequent as responses incor-rect on both. There were 13 responses incorrect on both dimensions compared to

33 responses incorrect on just one dimension

1

. This does not differ significantlyfrom the distribution expected by chance: Binomial test,

p

5

.30, 1-tailed. Of re-sponses incorrect on one dimension, 13 were incorrect on the left/right dimen-

1

Due to experimenter error, the precise responses of 3 children were not recorded.

Figure 2. Percentage of children reaching criterion on the picture gaze-directiontasks and Point-direction task in Experiment 1.


sion, and 20 were incorrect on the top/bottom dimension. Again, this does notdiffer from the distribution expected by chance, Binomial test,

p

5

.30, 2-tailed.

Discussion

These results extend the findings of Baron-Cohen and Cross (1992), Baron-Cohen et al. (1995), and Anderson and Doherty (1997) in several important ways:

1. Children are not able to judge gaze-direction in pictures until they are 3years old.2. Younger children have a specific difficulty with the gaze aspect of thepictures, as shown by their good performance on Point-direction task. Goodperformance on this task shows that children were paying attention to thecentral figure, were able to extrapolate from the figure to the target, and un-derstood the general form of the test question (“Which one is Sam pointing/looking at?”). The critical difference between the test questions in the twotasks was in the use of the verb

look.

Failure to understand

look

cannot ac-count for children’s poor performance, however, because

look

appears veryearly in children’s vocabularies. For example, Bretherton and Beeghly(1982) found

look

to be in the productive vocabularies of 27 out of 30 chil-dren aged 2 years 2 months. Children in the present study were all older than2 years 2 months, and the experiment only required

look

to be in their recep-tive vocabularies.3. The abilities to judge which person is looking at you, or which object a per-son is looking at, arise together and are strongly related, even when age is par-tialled out. This suggests that both are evidence of gaze understanding, that is,representation of a relation between the depicted person and the target object.

Two possible conclusions follow from these findings. The stronger conclusionis that failure on these gaze tasks indicates an inability to make judgments aboutgaze-direction. A milder conclusion would be that failure indicates an inability tomake judgments about gaze-direction in pictures only, that is, pictures might failto tap children’s face processing skills properly. This does not seem very plausiblefor several reasons. Vecera and Johnson (1995, Expt.3) have shown that even4-month-old infants can discriminate between direct and averted gaze in sche-matic drawings similar to the ones used here. This discrimination would beenough to pass the Looking-at-you task if children understood its significance.Also, Anderson and Doherty (1997) directly compared photographic and linedrawing stimuli of people looking at objects, and found no differences in perfor-mance. Further, this argument requires an explanation of why 3-year-olds sud-denly become much better at interpreting schematic drawings. Nevertheless, thebest way of deciding between the strong and mild conclusions is to compare chil-dren’s judgments of pictures with their judgments of real faces. That is the aim ofExperiment 2.


E

XPERIMENT

2

One salient difference between pictures as used in Experiment 1 and real faces isthat real faces move. Children might rely heavily on motion in their normal judg-ments of what someone is looking at. To examine this possibility, we presentedreal life gaze trials, in half of which the adult’s eye movements were visible. Thetargets were positioned near one end of a tunnel, which was rotated half-waythrough the session. In addition to introducing some variation into a repetitivetask, this had the effect of varying the size of the experimenter’s eye-movementsfrom large (approximately 45

8

) when the objects were close to him, to smaller(approximately 15

8

) when the objects were further away.

Method

Participants.

Thirty-six children (18 girls and 18 boys) took part in the ex-periment. Seven children came from a university nursery school and 29 camefrom a university playgroup in Stirling, Scotland; many children attended both.Four children had taken part in Experiment 1 fifteen months previously. For thepurposes of analysis children were divided into two groups: a younger group (18children from two years eleven months to 3 years 6 months, mean age 3 years 2months, SD

5

2 months) and an older group (18 children from 3 years 6 monthsto 4 years 11 months, mean age 4 years 1 month, SD

5

5 months).

Design.

Each child was tested on four tasks: the Real-face task, and theLooking-at-you, Looking-where, and Pointing picture tasks. The Real-face taskwas administered over two separate sessions in order to minimize boredom or fa-tigue. The picture tasks were administered as a block at the end of the first ses-sion, with order of presentation counterbalanced. Each task comprised four trialsthat were administered in a fixed sequence.

In the Real-face task the position of the target objects and whether the experi-menter’s eye-movements were visible were varied to yield 4 conditions: move-ment, near experimenter; movement, near child; no-movement, near experi-menter; no movement, near child. Conditions comprised a block of 4 trials,yielding 16 trials per session and 32 trials in total. Order of presentation wascounterbalanced, with the constraint that the position of the objects remained thesame in the first two conditions.

Procedure.

Real-face.

The session took place in a quiet room adjoining thecommunal playroom. The child and experimenter sat at opposite ends of a 1m-long rectangular wooden tunnel 52 cm high and 65 cm wide; by looking throughthe tunnel the child could see the experimenter’s head and shoulders. Just insideone end of the tunnel, target objects were affixed to each corner. The visual scenepresented to the child was of the experimenter’s face surrounded by 4 objectsframed by the tunnel. The tunnel also served to limit external distractions andconstrain the gaze-directions of the experimenter.


Target objects were a ball, a cup, a toy train and a small teddy bear for the firstsession and a wooden elephant, a toy car, a pair of plastic scissors and a toy cowfor the second. At the beginning of a session the objects were pointed out to chil-dren and they were asked to name them. All children were able to name the ob-jects.

The basic procedure was as follows. The experimenter made eye contact withthe child, moved his eyes to look at one of the objects without moving his head,and asked “Which one am I looking at?”. The question was repeated if the childmade no response. Once the child had responded the procedure was repeated forthe remaining three targets. Children could respond by naming or pointing. In thetwo no-movement conditions, the experimenter’s eye-movements were con-cealed by a 21

3

30 cm hand-held screen. In one movement and one no-move-ment condition the objects were at the experimenter’s end of the tunnel, and inthe remaining two conditions they were at the child’s end of the tunnel.

Looking-at-you, Looking-where, and Pointing

. These tasks were as in Experi-ment 1 with the exception that for the Looking-where and Point-direction tasksthe possible targets were the following colored objects: a cake, a balloon, a cup,and an airplane.

Results

The percentages of correct responses (i.e., not scored categorically) on each ofthe four Real-face conditions for the two age groups are shown in Figure 3. A be-tween- and within-subjects analysis of variance was carried out on the number ofcorrect responses, with age as the between-subjects factor and visibility of eye-movement and position of object as the within-subjects factors. Only age had asignificant effect: F (1, 34)

5

11.18,

p

,

.005, the older children performing bet-ter on each of the conditions.

Figure 4 shows the percentage of correct responses on the Real-face, Picturegaze tasks, and the Point-direction task. Performance on the Point-direction taskwas nearly perfect. Performances on the gaze tasks were all near ceiling for the4-year-old group, but poorer for the 3-year-old group. This age improvement wassignificant for the Real-face task, as demonstrated by the ANOVA, and for theLooking-at-you task (

t

(34)

5

3.19,

p

5

.003), but not for the Looking-where task(

t

(34)

5

1.26,

p

5

.22).Table 1 shows the intercorrelations between the three picture tasks and overall

performance on the Real-face task. Performances on the Real-face, Looking-where, and Looking-at-you tasks were all substantially and significantly intercor-related. Furthermore, these correlations persisted once age was partialled out:Real-face and Looking-where,

r

5 .60, p ,.001; Real-face and Looking-at-you,r 5 .60, p , .001; Looking-where and Looking-at-you, r 5 .52, p 5 .001.

When scored categorically as in Experiment 1, performances on the Looking-where and Looking-at-you tasks did not differ significantly from each other: 5 chil-dren passed the Looking-where task and failed the Looking-at-you task, and 1 childshowed the opposite pattern. Performance on the Point-direction task was superior


to performance on either gaze task: 12 children passed the Point-direction task andfailed the Looking-at-you task, and no child showed the opposite pattern, p , .001(Binomial test); 8 children passed the Point-direction task and failed the Looking-where task, and no child showed the opposite pattern, p , .01. In addition, whenthe proportions of correct responses on the Real-face and Looking-where taskswere compared there was no difference, t (35) 5 1.57, p 5 .13. It is not appropriateto compare performances on the Looking-at-you and Real-face tasks because oftheir different chance baselines, but from Figure 4 it is clear they were very similar.

Discussion

Children’s performance on the Real-face gaze task was strongly related to andnot significantly different from their performance on the picture gaze tasks. Thissuggests that the Real-face and picture tasks tap the same abilities. Consequently,children’s difficulties with the picture gaze tasks in Experiments 1 and 2 cannot beattributed to the pictorial nature of the stimuli. It would seem that, contrary to the ac-cepted view, toddlers are unable to make reliable judgments about gaze-direction.

Figure 3. Percentage of correct responses on the 4 conditions of the real-face gazedirection task in Experiment 2.


The overall performance of the younger group in Experiment 2 was consider-ably better than in the first experiment. The younger children in Experiment 1made 35% correct responses on the Looking-where task, compared to 75% cor-rect responses in Experiment 2; for the Looking-at-you the corresponding figuresare 56% and 75% (this appears less dramatic, but note the chance baseline in thistask is 50% correct). The children of the younger group in Experiment 2 were

Figure 4. Percentage of correct responses on the 3 gaze-direction tasks and thePoint-direction task in Experiment 2. Tasks are not scored categorically: chance per-formance is 25% for the Real-face, Looking-where, and Point-direction tasks, but is50% for the Looking-at-you task.

Table 1. Correlations between performance on the three picture tasks and the real-face task in Experiment 2

Looking-at-you Looking-where Real-face

Point-direction .30 .42* .31Looking-at-you — .57*** .69***Looking-where — .64***

*p , .05; ***p , .001.


older by a mean of 4 months, which may account for the differences in perfor-mance. If this is so, it emphasizes the rapid development of the ability to makegaze judgments about the age of 3 years.

The inability of younger children to make judgments about eye-direction doesnot mean they are unable to make judgments about attention at all. Eye-directionis usually congruent with head-direction. Younger children may represent a rela-tion between a person and an object on the basis of head-direction or a combina-tion of eye- and head-direction cues. As mentioned in the Introduction, infancystudies have shown a considerable lag between infants’ ability to follow anadult’s head-turn, and their ability to follow eye-movements alone (e.g., Corkum& Moore, 1995). Perhaps a similar lag would occur with judgments of gaze-direction? This is the question Experiment 3 set out to answer.

EXPERIMENT 3

Experiment 3 employed the picture stimuli used in the previous experiments. Inaddition, Looking-where and Looking-at-you tasks were included in which thehead was turned in the same direction as the eyes. In addition, a false belief taskwas administered in a separate, later session. We were curious about whether thegaze tasks would relate to the false belief task because gaze understanding hasbeen proposed as a precursor to the development of theory of mind (e.g., Gopnik,Slaughter, & Meltzoff, 1994).

Method

Participants. Forty children (23 girls and 17 boys) took part in the experi-ment. Eighteen children came from a University playgroup, 4 children camefrom a University nursery, and 18 children came from city center day nursery inStirling, Scotland. None of the children had taken part in previous experiments.For the purposes of analysis the children were divided into two groups: a youngergroup (20 children from 2 years 2 months to 3 years 2 months, mean age 2 years10 months, SD 5 3 months) and an older group (20 children from 3 years 3months to 4 years 8 months, mean age 3 years 9 months, SD 5 4 months).

Design. Each child was tested on five tasks: Looking-at-you (head forward),Looking-where (head forward), Looking-at-you (head-turn), Looking-where(head-turn), and Point-direction. The order of administration was counterbal-anced in a 5 3 5 sequence-balanced Latin square design. Each task comprisedfour trials which were administered in a fixed sequence. In addition a standardfalse belief task was administered in a separate session up to a week after the firstsession. Six of the children were unavailable or unwilling to be tested on the falsebelief task: 2 were in the older group and 4 were in the younger group.

Procedure. Looking-at-you (head forward), Looking-where (head forward),and Point-direction tasks. These tasks were the same as those used in Experiment


1, with slight modifications to the two eye-direction tasks to make the stimulimore realistic (see Figure 5). Eyebrows and a protruding nose were added, andboth pupils and irises were added to the eyes. The pupils were not in the centre ofthe irises, but closer to the object being looked at, to give the appearance of theeyes rotating in their sockets.

Looking-at-you (head turn), and Looking-where (head turn) tasks. These taskswere the same as the Looking-at-you (head forward) and Looking-where (headforward) tasks, but with further modifications to make the head appear turned inthe same direction as the eyes (see Figure 5). For the Looking-at-you task, thenose was seen in partial profile; the features were shifted to one side, and theeyes, irises and pupils made oval rather than circular. In the Looking-where taskthe head was also rotated 258 from the horizontal towards the target object. In allother respects these tasks were as in Experiment 1.

False Belief task. For this task children were introduced to Puppet, who washolding a key. He put his key in a 9 x 9 cm black box, and then went to have anap in the experimenter’s bag. While he was asleep the experimenter announcedhe was going to play a trick on Puppet, and moved the key from the box to under-neath the experimenter’s scoring sheets. Then Puppet ‘woke up’, and as the ex-

Figure 5. Examples of stimuli for the head turn gaze-direction tasks used in Exper-iment 3.


perimenter reached into his bag to retrieve him, the child was asked the followingquestions:

Belief Question: Where will Puppet look first for his key?Reality Question: Where is the key really?Memory Question: Where did Puppet put the key in the beginning?

Results

Figure 6 shows the percentage of children in each age group reaching criterionon each of the five tasks. As before, performance on the Point-direction task wasgood for both age groups, with 17 out of 20 younger children, and all 20 olderchildren correctly identifying all four targets. This age difference was not signifi-cant: Fisher’s exact, p 5 .231. Performance on the head forward gaze tasks wasalso comparable to Experiment 1. For the Looking-where task, only 3 out of 20younger children (15%) and 14 out of 20 older children (70%) reached criterion.This age difference is significant: Fisher’s exact, p 5 .001. For the Looking-at-you task, 7 out of 20 younger children (35%) and 11 out of 20 older children(55%) reached criterion. This age difference is not significant: Fisher’s exact,p 5 .341.

The most striking aspect of the results was the very good performance on thehead turn gaze tasks. On the Looking-where (head turn) task, 15 out of 20younger children (75%) and all the older children reached criterion. This age dif-

Figure 6. Percentage of children reaching criterion on the picture gaze-directiontasks and Point-direction task in Experiment 3.


ference is small but significant: Fisher’s exact, p 5 .047. On the Looking-at-you(head turn) task, 12 out of 20 younger children (60%) and 16 out of 20 older chil-dren (80%) reached criterion. This age difference is not significant: Fisher’s ex-act, p 5 .301.

Table 2 shows differences between the number of children passing one taskand failing another. For example, 10 children passed the Point-direction task andfailed the Looking-at-you (head turn) task, while only one child showed the op-posite pattern. As the table shows, performance on the Point-direction did notdiffer from performance on the head turn Looking-where task, but was superiorto performances on the other three tasks. The two head turn tasks did not differsignificantly from each other, although the better performance on the Looking-where task was marginally significant (p 5 .065). Performance on each head turntask was superior to performance on each of the head forward tasks. Perfor-mances on the two head forward tasks did not differ.

Table 3 shows the correlations between the five tasks. As before, the two headforward tasks were substantially and significantly correlated, and this correlationremained significant when age was partialled out, r 5 .62, p , .001. On the otherhand, the two head turn tasks were not strongly related to each other. The headturn and the head forward Looking-at-you tasks were highly correlated, and thiscorrelation also persisted when age was partialled out, r 5 .58, p , .001. Thecorrelation between the head forward and head turn Looking-where tasks wassignificant but low, and did not remain significant when age was partialled out,r 5 .18, p 5 .28. The head turn Looking-where task most strongly correlatedwith the Point-direction task, and remained so once age was partialled out, r 5 .38,p 5 .018.

As in Experiment 1, children’s incorrect responses on the head forward Look-ing-where task were examined for evidence of some influence of gaze-direction.There were 15 responses incorrect on both dimensions compared to 46 responsesincorrect on just one dimension. This does not differ significantly from the distri-

Table 2. Differences between performance on the five tasks of Experiment 3

Head Turn Head Forward

Looking-at-you Looking-where Looking-at-you Looking-where

Point-direction 10–1* 3–1 19–0*** 20–0***Head Turn

Looking-at-you 2–9 10–0** 13–2**Looking-where 18–1*** 18–0***

Head ForwardLooking-at-you 4–3

*p , .05; **p , .01; ***p , .001.Note: The pairs of numbers represent (number children passing row task, failing column task)-(num-

ber children passing column task, failing row task). The significance of differences was deter-mined using the Binomial test.


bution expected by chance: Binomial test, p 5 .10, 1-tailed. Of the 46 responsesincorrect on one dimension, 23 were correct on top/bottom dimension, and 23were correct on the left/right dimension; clearly this does not differ from thechance distribution.

However, on the head turn Looking-where task, children’s incorrect responsesdid not appear to be random. There were 2 responses incorrect on both dimen-sions compared to 16 responses incorrect on just one dimension, significantly dif-ferent from the distribution expected by chance: Binomial test, p 5 .035, 1-tailed.(The 2 responses incorrect on both dimensions both came from children whofailed the Point-direction task, and who may not have been attending.) Further-more, of the 16 responses incorrect on one dimension, 14 were correct on the left/right dimension, compared to 2 correct on the top/bottom dimension.

Children’s performance on the false belief task was typical of this age group.Only 6% of the younger children passed the false belief question compared to67% of the older group, a highly significant age improvement: Fisher’s exact,p 5 .0004. All of the children passed the reality control question; 6 younger chil-dren failed the memory control question, 5 of whom also failed the belief question.

Performance on the false belief task did not correlate highly with any of theother experimental variables. The only significant correlation was with the headforward Looking-where task, r 5 .40, p 5 .02, but this did not persist once agehad been partialled out, r 5 .19, p 5 .30. The performance on the false belief taskwas not significantly different to performance on the head forward gaze tasks: 13children passed the false belief task compared to 15 children who passed each ofthe gaze tasks.

Discussion

The inclusion of congruent head-direction information improved performancemarkedly. For the Looking-where task, performance approached ceiling and wasnot appreciably different to performance on the Point-direction task. Perfor-mance on the Looking-at-you task was also much better than performance on the

Table 3. Correlations between performance on the five tasks of Experiment 3

Head Turn Head Forward

Looking-at-you Looking-where Looking-at-you Looking-where

Point-direction .23 .47** .26 .25Head Turn

Looking-at-you .25 .59*** .34*Looking-where .19 .33*

Head ForwardLooking-at-you .65***

*p , .05; **p , .01; ***p , .001.


equivalent head forward task. Thus poor performance on the head forward taskscannot be attributed to the pictorial nature of the stimuli or failure to understandthe task demands or test question. Children seem to have a specific difficultywhen they must judge on the basis of eye-direction alone.

Performance on the Looking-where (head forward) task resembles that in Ex-periment 1. The older group in Experiment 3 were slightly younger than in Ex-periment 1 and performed slightly less well; performance of the younger groupsin the two experiments was comparably poor. Performance on the Looking-at-you (head forward) task appears to differ slightly from the pattern seen in Exper-iment 1. As in Experiment 1, a majority of older children passed this task, withperformance comparable to but slightly below that on the Looking-where task.The younger group, however, performed better than on the Looking-where task,with 7 out of 20 children passing the task. While the two tasks remain stronglyassociated and of similar difficulty overall, this difference is slightly surprising.It may, however, result from children taking the head turn tasks first: all seven ofthe younger children who passed the Looking-at-you (head forward) task had al-ready taken and passed the Looking-at-you (head turn) task. These children mayhave then had a tendency in the head forward task to pick the face that lookedmost like the target in the head turn task, accounting for the slightly higher per-formance.

The lack of relation between the False Belief task and any of the gaze taskswas surprising, since several authors (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1995; Gopnik et al.,1994) have proposed gaze understanding as a precursor to the development oftheory of mind. The present results suggest that gaze understanding may be aconcurrent development to false belief understanding, not a precursor.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

Before the present study, pictorial gaze tasks had only been used with 4-year-olds(Looking-where) and 3-year-olds (Looking-at-you), and these tasks had not beencompared with each other. We administered both tasks to 2-, 3-, and 4-year-oldchildren, alongside the novel Point-direction task to control for lack of attentionor other task specific difficulties. We also compared 3- and 4-year-old children’sperformance on these pictorial tasks and an analogous task with a real person inwhich, unlike previous studies eliciting gaze judgments about real people, wevaried how large eye-movements were and whether they were visible. Finally,we compared performance on tasks in which head-direction was always forward,or always congruent with eye-direction. The overall aim was to assess whetherthese explicit tasks elicit the same understanding that infants show when they fol-low others’ gaze or show sensitivity to being looked at.

All three experiments show that 2-year-olds’ and young 3-year-olds’ ability tojudge eye-direction in pictorial stimuli is poor. Children’s performance on theReal-face gaze task was strongly related to and not significantly different from


their performance on the picture gaze tasks. This suggests that the Real-face andpicture tasks tap the same understanding. Furthermore, even the younger childrenperformed well on the picture tasks when head-direction was included as a cue.Consequently, children’s difficulties with the picture gaze tasks cannot be attrib-uted to the pictorial nature of the stimuli or failure to understand the task de-mands or test question. Instead, it appears that until the age of 3 years children donot represent others’ eye-direction.

This conclusion is surprising in view of the broad consensus that gaze under-standing is present from infancy; different authors place the onset of gaze under-standing anywhere from 3 or 4 months (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Hood et al., 1998)to roughly 18 months (Butterworth & Jarrett, 1991; Corkum & Moore, 1995).However, as argued in the introduction, this consensus is largely based on in-fants’ ability to discriminate direct and averted gaze, and to orient in the directionsomeone else is looking. Neither ability requires the infant to represent the rela-tion between a person and the object of their attention.

Our findings accord reasonably well with most other research on children’sexplicit gaze understanding, which shows that 3-year-olds do not judge gaze per-fectly (Masangkay et al., 1974; Anderson & Doherty, 1997) and less well than4-year-olds (Baron-Cohen & Cross, 1992). Masangkay et al. (1974) found thatsome 2-year-olds could consistently judge gaze-direction. This apparent superi-ority to the 2-year-olds in the present study might reflect sample differences, orthe possibility that success could be achieved in Masangkay et al.’s study throughsimple orienting, as mentioned in the introduction. Nevertheless, in each study amajority of 2-year-olds and some 3-year-olds could not reliably judge gaze-direction.Lempers et al. (1977) is the only study that claims to demonstrate explicit gaze-understanding in a majority of 2-year-olds, but as discussed, the lack of detail re-garding 2-year-olds’ performance makes this claim impossible to assess.

The fact that eye-direction determines what someone is attending to is centralto understanding visual attention. If 2-year-olds do not understand this, howshould their understanding of attention be characterized? Children’s very goodperformance on the head turn gaze tasks would seem to indicate children are ableto represent a relation between a person and an object based on head-direction.Thus it could be argued they have some understanding of attention, but use dif-ferent cues to adults when judging what a person is attending to. However, chil-dren’s good performance on the head turn tasks could be attributed to simple ori-enting, as follows.

For the head turn Looking-where task, the strong directional cues of head- andeye-direction could draw children’s attention to the looked-at object. They wouldtherefore tend to respond with this object. This would not require them to repre-sent a relation between person and object. This is not possible in the Looking-at-you tasks, since children have to select one of the viewers, not identify the targetof gaze. However, children might find the direct gaze stimuli more arresting thanthe averted gaze stimuli, and pick them as a result. This tendency could be partic-


ularly pronounced when the averted gaze stimuli heads were turned away. Thesedifferent sources of false positives would explain why, in contrast to the head for-ward tasks, performances on the two head turn tasks are not correlated.2

So the present results do not allow us to ascribe 2-year-olds with any under-standing of attention based on head-direction or other non-gaze cues. There is lit-tle other research addressing the issue. Masangkay et al. (1974) showed childrencards with a picture of a dog on one side and a cat on the other. When the cardwas placed upright between the experimenter and the child, most 2-year-olds (10out of 16) could say which picture they themselves saw and which the experi-menter could see. Children appear to have realized at least one fact about visualperception: for someone to see something, it should not be occluded from them3.In order to realize this, children do not have to understand anything about eye-direction or to understand the attentional or mentalistic implications of the wordsee. Their understanding could plausibly be based on a heuristic rule, learnedthrough adults’ responses during interaction with objects: adults are more likelyto respond to an object when it is in the space between the child and the adult,and there is nothing between the object and the adult. This heuristic capturessomething similar to what O’Neill (1996) refers to as “engagement.”

O’Neill showed that 2-year-olds are sensitive to whether their parents have at-tended to a particular event. When requesting parents’ help to retrieve a desiredobject, 2-year-olds significantly more often named the object and its location andgestured towards it when their parents had not witnessed the object being placedthere. This might be taken to indicate a reasonably sophisticated understanding ofvisual attention: if someone has not seen something put somewhere, they will notknow where it is, and have to be informed more about it if they are to get it. How-ever, O’Neill herself gives a more parsimonious explanation in terms of ‘disen-gagement’. She argues that the results do not “imply that the child recognizes thatone or more of the parent’s specific sensory capabilities has been (negatively) af-fected” (O’Neill, 1996, p. 674). Instead, children are sensitive to adults’ generalinvolvement in their activities. Even young infants increase communicationwhen adults do not seem to be involved in current activities (Ross & Lollis,1987). By the time they are 2 years old, argues O’Neill, children can also take

2 Since the two head forward tasks are so well correlated, simple orienting is not a plausibleexplanation for success on them. Furthermore, development under the simple orienting accountwould be expected to be gradual as children become increasingly adept at using attentional cues. Infact development on these tasks is quite abrupt, with no sign of transitional performance: the errordata for the head forward Looking-where task show no evidence of partial success (unlike the headturn Looking-where task).

3 There is also a relatively trivial interpretation of this finding, which Masangkay et al.acknowledge: children may interpret the question “what do I see?” as “what is on my side of thecard?”


into account past disengagement and increase their communication about eventsthat took place during that period.

This requires children to have some way of judging when an adult is involved,or has the potential to become involved in some activity. O’Neill suggests as pos-sible cues: whether the parent is present, has his or her eyes shut, is talking tosomeone else, or appears distracted. In other words, children’s judgments arebased on fairly general considerations. In the context of the present study, chil-dren might judge people to be potentially engaged with anything in front of themand not occluded. If the person turns his head away from something, he is lesslikely to be engaged with it; if he turns his head towards it, he is more likely to beengaged with it. In other words, the head turn stimuli offer children a cue theycan use to determine which object a person is engaged with, or which person isengaged with them. The head forward stimuli do not offer such a cue. Their con-cept of engagement does not include subtle cues such as eye-direction, which inany case is less enduring and salient, and generally less useful than head-direc-tion or body posture in determining what someone is engaged with.

In addition to engagement, it is clear that younger children are specificallysensitive to gaze-direction. It has been argued that this sensitivity is based onsimple orientation. In principle it is possible that children are able, for example,to locate accurately the target of someone’s gaze without representing a relationbetween the person and the object (Moore & Corkum, 1994). On this account,children associate a set of gaze cues – head turn, eye-direction – with the pres-ence of an interesting object in a specific location or direction. Although this as-sociation relies on the gaze cues and the object being connected (via gaze), chil-dren do not represent the connection itself. Gaze understanding could be said tobe implicit in children’s behavior. Importantly, children do not represent the gazerelation.

On the other hand, the explicit head forward gaze tasks used in this study re-quire children to represent the link between the stimulus person’s eyes and thetarget (probably – very sophisticated orienting could, by directing children’s at-tention to one target, allow children to pass). However, it is possible that youngchildren’s gaze following is genuinely based on gaze understanding, but that therepresentation is initially only useable in orienting oneself, and not available toconsciousness or for verbal report. For example, Karmiloff-Smith’s (1992) repre-sentational redescription theory allows for levels of explicitness, including alevel at which representations are explicit but not available to consciousness orverbal report which she refers to as E1. If children’s representations of gaze werelimited to this context specific, non-conscious explicit representational form, itmight make little practical difference to representing others’ gaze by the set ofassociations underpinning simple orienting. It might prove a more condensed for-mat in which to represent other’s looking behavior, but it is difficult to see whatother benefits it would have, or how it could be demonstrated that children’s rep-resentations were in this form. At present, the data on children’s understanding of


other’s visual attention seem to be adequately explained by a combination ofsimple orienting and understanding of others’ engagement. This may be under-pinned by an E1 representation of gaze behavior, or a more piecemeal associativerepresentation; at present it is not possible to say which.

If young children’s understanding of attention is limited to simple orientingplus “engagement,” what causes the shift to a more sophisticated explicit (con-scious and verbalizable) understanding of attention? Here we can only speculate,but it could be that the shift is caused by children’s developing understandingof mind. Gaze understanding seems to be developing around the same time aschildren start to pass the false belief task, the usual diagnostic test of a represen-tational theory of mind. However, it is not possible from the present results to ar-gue that gaze understanding is a precursor to theory of mind, as many have sug-gested (e.g., Gopnik, Slaughter, & Meltzoff, 1994; Baron-Cohen, 1995). Gazeunderstanding may emerge as part of children’s general interest and understand-ing of things mental without being specifically related to their understanding ofmental misrepresentation (which is what the false belief task measures). As chil-dren begin to understand that people are psychologically connected to the world,they may also begin to understand the importance of gaze in determining pre-cisely which parts of the world people are psychologically connected to.

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a new look at gaze: preschool children's understanding of eye-direction

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