The Role Of Joint Attention In Children’s Relationship Formation

Positive relationships with other people play a critical role in the survival and reproduction of an individual.Living in an environment featuring interdependence,human beings have evolved a mechanism for sharing mental states: relationships between individuals can be established through the sharing of high-level mental states(e.g.,attitudes,emotions,beliefs),and low-level mental states(e.g.,attention,goals,intentions).Recent research that looks into joint attention—the most basic form of sharing low-level mental states—has found that individuals can form social bonds through attending to the same object with others.Joint attention refers to individuals knowing that they are both attending to the same object.It consists of two levels.The first level is common attention in the third-person’s perspective,where the individual and another person,as observers,infer from clues in the environment that they are almost simultaneously attending to the same object and are aware of each other’s attention to the object.The second level is shared attention in the second-person perspective,where direct interactions occur between the individual and another person,both of whom confirm through communication that they are attending to the same object and are aware of each other’s attention to the object.What role do the different levels of joint attention play in the establishment of relationships?No research has yet directly explored this question.Based on the theoretical assumptions that“social cognition emerges from second-person perspective”,the present research hypothesized that individuals’ ability to build relationships through joint attention first occurs in shared attention in the second-person perspective,rather than common attention in the third-person perspective.The present research tested the hypothesis through two experiments that involved a total of236 children(half male and half female)aged 3.By inviting subjects to watch videos in pairs,an environment for joint attention was created between them.Then subjects’ relationships were measured through the physical distance between them and their sharing behaviors.Experiment 1explored whether children were able to establish relationships through shared attention,while Experiment 2 explored whether children were able to build relationships through common attention.The main results are as follows: 1)Paired children engaging in the shared attention of watching videos together tended to share more resources with each other,compared to those in the non-shared attention of watching videos separately;but when it comes to their physical distance,no significant differences have been observed.2)No significant differences have been observed either in the number of resources shared or their physical distance between paired children engaged in the common attention of watching the video separately,yet with clues suggesting they are attending to the same object,and those engaged in non-common attention of watching the video separately,with clues suggesting they are attending to different objects.In conclusion,this study indicated that the joint attention for establishing peer relationships in early childhood(at the age of 3)might first develop in the second-person perceptive—through direct interactions in the stance of a participant;in early childhood(at the age of 3),peer relationship cannot be formed through joint attention in the third-person perspective—indirect reasoning in the stance of an observer.This research provides direct evidence for the theoretical assumption of “social cognition emerges from second-person perspective”,revealing considerable influence of shared attention on the formation of interpersonal relationships during early childhood,and offering theoretical guidance for the training of children’s social skills.