ABSTRACT
Developmentalists have studied the infant’s changing relation to objects for decades, probing it to answer questions about the development of motor skills, cognition, communication, and attention. In our laboratory, we are trying to contribute to these efforts by focusing on how objects emerge as a topic of social interaction. We find that a central conceptual challenge is the selection of heuristic strands from the rich tapestry of communication between infants and their caregivers (Adamson, 1996). Our studies (Adamson & Bakeman, 1982; Bakeman & Adamson, 1984) have concentrated primarily on infant attention to describe patterns over time and across communicative contexts. Holding onto this thread, we have plotted the temporal succession of engagement, noting that the infant’s turn toward objects occurs after they have mastered the rudiments of social interaction and that the integration of objects into communicative exchanges may begin well before the infant is able to modulate attention to both his social partners and events of shared concern (Adamson & Bakeman, 1991; Adamson & Chance, 1998). Furthermore, we have found that states of infant attention to objects and people provide a frame in which to view specific communicative acts such as gestures, words, and affective expressions (e.g., Adamson & Bakeman, 1985; Bakeman & Adamson, 1986).
