Automated gaze-contingent objects elicit orientation following in 8-month-old infants

Abstract

The current study tested whether the purely amodal cue of contingency elicit orientation following behaviour in 8-months-old infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with automated objects without human features that did or did not react contingently to the infants' fixations recorded by an eye-tracker. We found that an object's occasional orientation towards peripheral targets was reciprocated by a congruent visual orientation following response by infants only when it had displayed gaze-contingent interactivity. Our finding demonstrates that infants' gaze following behaviour does not depend on the presence of a human being. The results are consistent with the idea that the detection of contingent reactivity, like other communicative signals, can itself elicit the illusion of being addressed in 8-months-old infants.