I See Your Point: Infants Under 12 Months Understand That Pointing Is Communicative

Abstract

Do young infants understand that pointing gestures allow the pointer to change the information state of a recipient? We used a third-party experimental scenario to examine whether 9- and 11-month-olds understand that a pointer's pointing gesture can inform a recipient about a target object. When the pointer pointed to a target, infants subsequently looked longer when the recipient selected the nontarget rather than the target object. In contrast, infants looked equally long whether the recipient selected the target or nontarget object when the pointer used a noncommunicative gesture, a fist. Finally, when the recipient had no perceptual access to the pointing gesture, infants looked longer when the recipient selected the target rather than the nontarget object. Young infants understand a fundamental aspect of the communicative function of pointing: Pointing, but not all gestures, can transfer information. Gestures may thus be one of the tools infants use for an early understanding of communication.

Notes

¹In a superficially similar study, 14-month-old infants successfully retrieved a hidden toy after watching a third-party interaction in which a pointer indicated the hidden toy's location for a recipient either intentionally or absent-mindedly (Gräfenhain, Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009). In that experiment, however, the dependent variable was infants’ response to the pointing gesture, and as such, infants needed only to follow the pointer's intentional point to the correct location themselves; infants did not need to consider the recipient at all.