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Abstract

Imagine being a newborn and perceiving the world with all of your senses for the first time. How are infants capable of handling this conceivably enormous plenty of information and novel impressions that they encounter, given their limited capacities in memory and attention? The directed attention model of infant social cognition (DAM) (Hoehl et al., 2009; Reid & Striano, 2007, 2008) offers a framework to explain these early capacities. It describes information processing as a sequence of five stages that enable the infant to reduce the amount of input through focusing on information that is of social relevance. One crucial step in this model is Stage Four, the stage of the detection of object-directed attention. In this stage, the infant uses social cues to relate the focus of attention of an agent to objects in the environment. My dissertation concentrates on the role of eye gaze direction in Stage Four of the DAM and investigates neural and behavioral correlates of different aspects of object-directed attention in early infancy and childhood.