Actively Directing Attention: Pointing

We have all been in situations where we need to draw someone’s attention to something important. This often involves the act of pointing, particularly in learning environments and other contexts of interacting with infants and toddlers. Why is pointing so helpful?

Consider a pre-verbal infant and the limitations of using language alone to draw an infant’s attention. We have discussed visual stimuli (e.g., objects) and certain kinds of sounds (e.g., the human voice), but what about pointing?

We may take something like pointing for granted because we do it so often, and it seems so basic: you direct your index finger towards something of interest, and others around you follow the visual track of the direction of that index finger. You will often accompany this gesture with a label (in the case of a young child, remember “light” from above) or perhaps a longer verbal explanation.

But the act of pointing in and of itself is not at all basic. In fact, when you point to an object (like a ball) towards a non-human animal (such as a dog), the dog is more likely to look at your finger than its trajectory towards the ball. That is because pointing is essentially symbolic — the index finger is representing what is important.

The dog cannot find the ball, nor can the infant find the light, by looking at someone’s index finger. They must understand that the index finger is literally “indexing” something; that is, directing attention towards something else (the ball or the light). Therefore, infants are typically unable to interpret pointing until they start to understand the use of symbols, such as language, in late infancy at 10-13 months (see Rohlfing et al., 2012, for further reading).

Adults Pointing for Infants and Children

Rohlfing and colleagues (2012) investigated how infants interpret pointing to see just how early they can do so. It is important to note — as the authors do in their paper — that both pointing and shared eye gaze are the mechanisms through which joint attention is established. If you can determine what someone is looking at or what they are pointing to, you can both pay attention to the same thing at the same time, enabling that joint engagement and vast learning potential that occurs through joint attention.

Previous work had determined that following an adult’s eye gaze happened much earlier than in late infancy, so these authors wanted to see if the same was the case for pointing. One of the interesting things they did in their methodology was that they used two kinds of pointing with infants (aged 4.5 and 6.5 months): static (pointing with a still hand) and dynamic (pointing with a movement directed towards a stimulus). They found that even the youngest infants were able to follow the gesture of pointing when it was dynamic, i.e., a movement of the hand towards the object in question (Rohlfing et al., 2012).

Think about the implications of this finding for when we interact with infants and how we draw their attention. It is important to remember our role as adults and how dynamic interactional structures guide attention. How do we seek to establish joint attention with them? Perhaps we are unaware of our subconscious biases about what we are focusing on and how we are directing infants’ and children’s attention.

Infants Using Pointing

What about how infants themselves use pointing? Surely, this demonstrates their understanding of the symbolic use of the index finger to draw attention to an object and to establish joint attention. But wait — we cannot assume that because an infant points, they have such insights.

Liszkowski and colleagues (2004) addressed this very question in a study of 12-month-olds’ pointing behaviours to adults. What was interesting about this study is that the adults reacted in different ways to how the infants were pointing, and then the researchers observed how the infants responded to these adult reactions. So, for example, adults showed different levels of attention to the object or different levels of engagement, and sometimes they either only looked at the infant (not at what the infant was pointing to) or they only looked at the object being pointed at.

What was so fascinating is that when the adults’ level of engagement was higher and they shared attention on the object with the infant, the infant pointed more frequently and for longer periods (Liszkowski et al., 2004).

The authors interpreted these responses by the infants as indicating they were actively engaged in establishing joint attention. These findings have important implications for how we view infants as active participants in attending to stimuli in the world, enabling opportunities for learning through shared interactions.