Revisiting how we operationalize joint attention.

Parent-child interactions support the development of a wide range of socio-cognitive abilities in young children. As infants become increasingly mobile, the nature of these interactions change from person-oriented to object-oriented, with the latter relying on children's emerging ability to engage in joint attention. Joint attention is acknowledged to be a foundational ability in early child development, broadly speaking, yet its operationalization has varied substantially over the course of several decades of developmental research devoted to its characterization. Here, we outline two broad research perspectives-social and associative accounts-on what constitutes joint attention. Differences center on the criteria for what qualifies as joint attention and regarding the hypothesized developmental mechanisms that underlie the ability. After providing a theoretical overview, we introduce a joint attention coding scheme that we have developed iteratively based on careful reading of the literature and our own data coding experiences. This coding scheme provides objective guidelines for characterizing mulitmodal parent-child interactions. The need for such guidelines is acute given the widespread use of this and other developmental measures to assess atypically developing populations. We conclude with a call for open discussion about the need for researchers to include a clear description of what qualifies as joint attention in publications pertaining to joint attention, as well as details about their coding. We provide instructions for using our coding scheme in the service of starting such a discussion.

Parental use of multimodal cues in the initiation of joint attention as a function of child hearing status.

In the current study, we examine how hearing parents use multimodal cuing to establish joint attention with their hearing (N=9) or deaf (N=9) children during a free-play session. The deaf children were all candidates for cochlear implantation who had not yet been implanted, and each hearing child was age-matched to a deaf child. We coded parents' use of auditory, visual, and tactile cues, alone and in different combinations, during both successful and failed bids for children's attention. Although our findings revealed no clear quantitative differences in parents' use of multimodal cues as a function of child hearing status, secondary analyses revealed that hearing parents of deaf children used shorter utterances while initiating joint attention than did hearing parents of hearing children. Hearing parents of deaf children also touched their children twice as often throughout the play session than did hearing parents of hearing children. These findings demonstrate that parents differentially accommodate the specific needs of their hearing and deaf children in subtle ways to establish communicative intent.