ABSTRACT
Sharing experience in joint activity requires what Bowlby (1969) calls a “goal-corrected” partnership in which each member is “prepared, when necessary, to relinquish, or at least adjust, his or her own set goals to suit the other's” (p. 355). Infants' skills in negotiating bouts of joint visual attention may well be among the building blocks of these early social partnerships. Infants' ability to follow others' gaze to an object of interest represents a crucial transition from face-to-face engagement in early infancy to joint exploration of, and communication about, objects in the environment (Tronick, Als, & Adamson, 1979). In establishing and maintaining joint gaze on an object, mother and infant continue the mutually regulated, pleasurable process of sharing experience begun in earlier face-to-face play (Mundy, Kasari, & Sigman, 1992; Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978).
