"Joint attention"

Infants as young as 14 months can track cross-situational statistics between sets of words and objects to acquire word-referent mappings. However, in naturalistic word learning situations, words and objects occur with a host of additional information, sometimes noisy, present in the environment. In this study, we tested the effect of this environmental variability on infants' word learning. Fourteen-month-old infants (N = 32) were given a cross-situational word learning task with additional gestural, prosodic, and distributional cues that occurred reliably or variably...

Numerous studies have shown that the gaze of others produces a special attentional process, such as the eye contact effect or joint attention. This study investigated the attentional process triggered by various types of gaze stimuli (i.e. human, cat, fish, koala, and robot gaze). A total of 300 university students participated in five experiments. They performed a spatial Stroop task in which five types of gaze stimuli were presented as targets. Participants were asked to judge the direction of the target (left or right) irrespective of its location (left or right)...

Theories of early development have emphasized the power of caregivers as active agents in infant socialization and learning. However, there is variability, across communities, in the tendency of caregivers to engage with their infants directly. This raises the possibility that infants and children in some communities spend more time engaged in solitary activities than in dyadic or triadic interactions. Here, we focus on one such community (indigenous Wichi living in Argentina's Chaco Forest) to test this possibility...

Temporal coordination of communicative behavior is not only located between but also within interaction partners (e.g., gaze and gestures). This intrapersonal synchrony (IaPS) is assumed to constitute interpersonal alignment. Studies show systematic variations in IaPS in individuals with autism, which may affect the degree of interpersonal temporal coordination. In the current study, we reversed the approach and mapped the measured nonverbal behavior of interactants with and without ASD from a previous study onto virtual characters to study the effects of the differential IaPS on observers (N = 68), both with and without ASD (crossed design)...

The process by which infants learn verbs through daily social interactions is not well-understood. This study investigated caregivers' use of verbs, which have highly abstract meanings, during unscripted toy-play. We examined how verbs co-occurred with distributional and embodied factors including pronouns, caregivers' manual actions, and infants' locomotion, gaze, and object-touching. Object-action verbs were used significantly more often during caregiver-infant joint attention interactions. Movement and cognition verbs showed distinct co-occurrences with different contexts...

The current study investigates Joint Attention (JA) characteristics (duration, frequency, source of initiation, type of JA, agent of termination, missed and unsuccessful episodes) in preterm and full-term toddlers' interactions with their mothers and fathers, separately. Thirty-one singleton full-term (Mage = 24.07 months, SD = 1.45; 13 boys) and 17 singleton preterm toddlers (Madjustedage = 24.72 months, SD = 3.39; 12 boys) participated in the study with both parents. JA episodes were examined during dyadic five-minute free play sessions, were coded second-by-second, and were analysed using two-way mixed ANOVAs...

Multiple cardiac diseases are closely associated with functional parameters of the left ventricle, but functional parameter quantification still requires manual involvement, a time-consuming and less reproducible task. We develop a joint attention network (JANet) and expand it into two versions (V1 and V2) that can be used to segment the left ventricular region in echocardiograms to assist physicians in diagnosis. V1 is a smaller model with a size of 56.3 MB, and V2 has a higher accuracy. The proposed JANet V1 and V2 achieve a mean dice score (DSC) of 93...

Supervised deep learning (SDL) methodology holds promise for accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (AMRI) but is hampered by the reliance on extensive training data. Some self-supervised frameworks, such as deep image prior (DIP), have emerged, eliminating the explicit training procedure but often struggling to remove noise and artifacts under significant degradation. This work introduces a novel self-supervised accelerated parallel MRI approach called PEARL, leveraging a multiple-stream joint deep decoder with two cross-fusion schemes to accurately reconstruct one or more target images from compressively sampled k-space...

Individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) have a specific and atypical neuropsychological profile, where language is above what is expected for their mental age, although it shows a late onset. There exists only one longitudinal study in infants younger than 20 months old with WS about early language precursors (joint attention, referential and instrumental behaviors, pointing gesture, verbal tags). The aim of this investigation is to evaluate these precursors in a baby with WS (8 to 18 months). Seven sessions of systematic observation were performed (six at baby's home, one at the Early Childhood Assistance center)...

Research has shown that infants' language development is influenced by their gaze following-an ability linked to their cognitive and social development. Following social learning approaches, this pilot study explored whether variations in gaze following and later vocabulary scores relate to early mother-infant interactions by focusing on the role of mothers' gaze responsiveness in infants' attentional and language development. We recruited 15 mother-child pairs in Poland and assessed their engagement in joint attention episodes...

British systematics was distinctly marked by a raft of vituperative controversies around the turn of the 1830s. After the local collapse of broad consensus in the Linnaean system by 1820, the emergence of new schemes of classification-most notably, the "quinarian" system of William Sharp Macleay-brought with it an unprecedented register of public debate among zoologists in Britain, one which a young Charles Darwin would bitterly describe to his friend John Stevens Henslow in October 1836 as possessing a "mean quarrelsome spirit," conducted in "a manner anything but like that of gentlemen...

We explore the emergence of symbols during interactions between individuals through an experimental semiotic study. Previous studies have investigated how humans organize symbol systems through communication using artificially designed subjective experiments. In this study, we focused on a joint-attention-naming game (JA-NG) in which participants independently categorized objects and assigned names while assuming their joint attention. In the Metropolis-Hastings naming game (MHNG) theory, listeners accept provided names according to the acceptance probability computed using the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder characterized by stereotypies or repetitive behaviors and impairments in social behavior and socio-communicative skills. One hallmark phenotype of ASD is poor joint attention skills compared to neurotypical controls. In addition, individuals with ASD have lower scores on several of the Big 5 personality dimensions, including Extraversion. Here, we examine these traits in a nonhuman primate model (chimpanzees; Pan troglodytes ) to further understand the relationship between personality and joint attention skills, as well as the genetic and neural systems that contribute to these phenotypes...

Patients' Unplanned Extubation (UEX) is dangerous in the intensive care units (ICU), it is necessary to make early warning of UEX. However, the low fine-grained action of UEX and complexity of ICU environment make early warning a great challenging by using RGB video data. To address this issue, we propose a novel lightweight Spatial-Temporal Transformer (STformer) for early warning of patients' UEX action in the ICU. Specially, the SlowFast is used to extract patient's spatial-temporal features initially. Then, in order to improve the representation of features, we introduce spatial attention to enhance the spatial representation of fine-grained actions, and capture the long-term dependency of motions through temporal attention...

We re-examine whether the type of object played with influences parent-infant joint attention. A within-participants comparison of 24 parent-9-month-old dyads, used head-mounted eye-tracking to measure parental naming and infant attention during play with touchscreen apps on a touchscreen tablet or matched interactive toys. Infants engaged in sustained attention more to the toy than the tablet. Parents named objects less in toy play. Infants exhibited more gaze shifts between the object and their parent during tablet play...

Communicative signals such as eye contact increase infants' brain activation to visual stimuli and promote joint attention. Our study assessed whether communicative signals during joint attention enhance infant-caregiver dyads' neural responses to objects, and their neural synchrony. To track mutual attention processes, we applied rhythmic visual stimulation (RVS), presenting images of objects to 12-month-old infants and their mothers (n = 37 dyads), while we recorded dyads' brain activity (i.e., steady-state visual evoked potentials, SSVEPs) with electroencephalography (EEG) hyperscanning...

Sharing joint visual attention to an object with another person biases infants to encode qualitatively different object properties compared to a parallel attention situation lacking interpersonal sharedness. This study investigated whether merely observing joint attention amongst others shows the same effect. In Experiment 1 (first-party replication experiment), N = 36 9-month-old German infants were presented with a violation-of-expectation task during which they saw an adult looking either in the direction of the infant (eye contact) or to the side (no eye contact) before and after looking at an object...

In recent years, innovative multiparty eye tracking setups have been introduced to synchronously capture eye movements of multiple individuals engaged in computer-mediated collaboration. Despite its great potential for studying cognitive processes within groups, the method was primarily used as an interactive tool to enable and evaluate shared gaze visualizations in remote interaction. We conducted a systematic literature review to provide a comprehensive overview of what to consider when using multiparty eye tracking as a diagnostic method in experiments and how to process the collected data to compute and analyze group-level metrics...

Eye tracking is one of the techniques used to investigate cognitive mechanisms involved in the school context, such as joint attention and visual perception. Eye tracker has portability, straightforward application, cost-effectiveness, and infant-friendly neuroimaging measures of cognitive processes such as attention, engagement, and learning. Furthermore, the ongoing software enhancements coupled with the implementation of artificial intelligence algorithms have improved the precision of collecting eye movement data and simplified the calibration process...

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have shown great promise in processing spatio-temporal information compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, there remains a performance gap between SNNs and ANNs, which impedes the practical application of SNNs. With intrinsic event-triggered property and temporal dynamics, SNNs have the potential to effectively extract spatio-temporal features from event streams. To leverage the temporal potential of SNNs, we propose a self-attention-based temporal-channel joint attention SNN (STCA-SNN) with end-to-end training, which infers attention weights along both temporal and channel dimensions concurrently...