ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with gaze as a social motivator in human infants. It describes the infant gaze has been studied largely from the perspective of cognitive domains that have ranged from face learning and recognition, to the ontogeny of language, to mutual gaze in joint attention. Infants actively engage adult strangers in what appears to be efforts to elicit particular behaviors from them. If human infants strive for ideal levels of stimulation, then one basis of preferring particular adults is their ability to cause or be associated with the ideal level. The reflections on the influences of mutual gaze are coherent with literatures on infant face recognition, energy conservation and growth, and the increasing specificity of infant motivation, analgesic, and calming mechanisms. Consistent with its multiple social functions, mutual gaze also sustains infant performance. Separate timetables are congruent with separate chemosensory and orotactile afferent systems in human infant comforting and separate neurochemical mediation of each.
