ABSTRACT
The ability to use another person to find out about the world is a profoundly important human characteristic. If a defining feature of human nature is its dependence on forms of cultural learning (Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993), then it is evident that a necessary condition for such learning is the presence of capacities that allow a young child to make discoveries about the world by entering into situations in which attention to that world is shared with another. One of the simplest and most basic of such capacities is the ability to follow the gaze of another person so that the infant ends up attending to whatever it is that the adult finds of interest. Gaze following allows the child to pay attention to what adults are paying attention without requiring the adult to be constantly monitoring the child’s focus. In this chapter, I review the research on gaze following and propose an account of its development that rests on changes in the way in which the infant’s own attention is controlled.
