Gaze Shift as an Interactional Resource for Very Young Children

Abstract

This article examines how very young children in a day care center make use of their peers' gaze shifts to differentially locate and prepare for the possibility of a caregiver intervention during situations of their biting, hitting, pushing, and the like. At issue is how the visible character of a gaze shift—that is, the manner in which it is produced and its position in a sequence of ongoing activities—constitutes gaze as differentiable social action and, further, provides children with a resource for discerning what is likely to happen next. Children, sensitive to the epistemic status of what the peer may or may not have located in terms of the caregiver as an “already there,” a “newly discovered,” or a “yet to be discovered” feature of the scene cease, continue, or revise their harassments in accord with their discernments.

Notes

¹“She” is used because the caregivers in this study are all women.

²“Giving off” refers to a behavior that is not intentionally designed for uptake and action by another. For an interesting comparison with apes who gaze follow, but do not follow the intentionally communicative act of pointing, see Tomasello (2006, pp. 508–510).

³A reason that the number of noticing gaze shifts is low is that it can be quite difficult to determine if, in fact, one participant's noticing occasions another's or if the two are simply noticing something at the same time (i.e., they are both responding to an environmental stimulus that has caught their attention). In the cases that have been selected for the data selection, the timing of participants' actions is key: The first gazer makes a noticing, stabilizes on a target, and then the second party gaze shifts to the target.

⁴Other combinations of features are possible, but the ones presented here were most clearly associated with peer gaze shifts that were utilized by children to discern the whereabouts of the caregiver and gauge the likelihood of an intervention. For example, vocal action in the form of an appeal does not necessarily have to be produced in conjunction with a looking to or search gaze shift. In withholding vocal action, the gazer positions himself herself as a potential recipient of caregiver action rather than an initiator of caregiver action. In the interests of space, it is only this latter situation that can be considered here.

⁵It is not inconceivable that the peer might halt (or otherwise find him- or herself disengaged from) an activity and then look to the caregiver for help; but in these data, this plays out as a search. In the case of searches, peers may stop what they are doing to look for the caregiver.

⁶It has been difficult to find the right terms to identify children's roles in these cases. In the interests of keeping consistent with terminology used in other parts of the article, the following terms are used: “peer” and “harasser.”

⁷“Almost” and “potential” are key terms here because it is precisely the permeability of enforcement that children figure out how to exploit.