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CHAPTER I Social and Cognitive Determinants of Mutual Gaze Between Mother and Infant L. D'ODORICO and M.C. LEVORATO Introduction The value of eye contact in social communication is demonstrated by the great number ofstudies investigating the attractiveness ofeyes for human infants (K. Bloom, 1974; Hainline, 1978; Robson, 1967; Samuels, 1985; Wolff, 1961). Mutual visual interaction is in effect the earliest opportunity the mother-infant dyad has for communication. From birth infants can control the flow of visual stimuli, maintaining visual fixation for interesting stimuli and diverting it from too familiar or too intense inputs (Cohen, 1973; Fantz, 1966). This capacity also applies to social contact; therefore, social exchanges between mother and infant by means of mutual gazel create the first dyadic system in which the two individuals have similar control (Stern, 1971, 1974b). Furthermore, especially in the early phase ofdevelopment, eye contact is a very significant behavior for the caregiver, because it signals that the infant is really participating in the interactive exchange and is not simply a recipient of mother's solicitations. Researchers in this field, however, have studied infants' gaze towards mothers, together with other communicative indices (smiling, vocalizations, particular postures) only in the perspective ofidentifying regularities in the early interactive structure (Herscherson, 1964; S. Friedman, 1972; Stern, 1971, 1974a); on the other hand, eye contact has been considered an important factor in the formation and maintenance ofattachment(Brazelton, Tronick, Adamson, Als, & Wise, 1975; Hittelman & Dickes, 1979; Robson, 1967). In both cases the focus is on relational-affective aspects of eye contact or on its social value in the maintenance ofinteraction. Our focus is different. We are interested in the cognitive determinants of the infant's capacity to interrupt active exploration ofexternal reality to share the experience with the mother through eye contact. In the 1styear oflife, infants not only establish their first socialrelationships, but also make relevant steps in their knowledge of the physical external world: A slightly different version of this paper was originally published in Italian in G. Attili and P. RiCci Bitti (Eds.) 1983, Comunicare senza parole, Roma: Bulzoni, pp. 49-62. 'The phenomenon by which both partners look into each other's eye has been referred to as "mutual glance," "mutual visual interaction,""eyecontact" and "mutualgaze" (cf., Exline & Fehr, 1982). We use these terms interchangeably for indicating simultaneously exchanged looks between mother and infant. IO L. D'Odorico and M.e. Levorato they develop many skills for exploring objects, understand the first causal relationships between their actions and the consequences, and begin to search intentionally for the most suitable means of obtaining desired goals. It is necessary, therefore, to arrive at an integrated model of social and cognitive development, in which intentions towards objects are coordinatedwith intentions towards social agents. A first step in the construction ofthis model is to investigate how the communicative structures that infants develop in order to contact the social world and the cognitive structures they elaborate to interact with the physical world integrate with each other. For vocal activity in the prelinguistic period, data have been reported elsewhere (Benelli, D'Odorico, Levorato, & Simion, 1980), showing that only at about 15 months of age are infants able to address intentional vocalizations to their mothers in order to make "comments" on their experience of the physical world. In this research, we investigate the ways in which this type ofsharingoccurs by means of an earlier type of communicative exchange: the mutual gaze. Although after birth eye contact is regulated in the infant by a homeostatic mechanism ofattention/disattention, in our opinion it very soon becomes a real psychological behavior. More specifically, we hypothesize that: In the first months of life looking towards mother's eyes has the value of an answer to mother's solicitations,while in the following period the infant becomes more and more capable of initiating the exchange by her/himself . - In the first months oflife there is a sort ofantagonism between the activity ofinteracting with a social partner and that ofexploring objects; this fact makes it difficult for the infant to interrupt a sequence ofexplorations of an object in order to involve mother; if this occurs, loss of interest in the object is the result (for infants' incapacity to consider social and nonsocial objects at the same time, see also Nelson, 1979; Sugarman-Bell, 1978). - The capacity to coordinate a social schema of communication and a cognitive schema of action is demonstrated when infants' experience of knowing becomes the "signified" ofeye contact with mothers and the gaze...

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