ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the literature germane to these points and argues that there is incongruence in the answers to these two questions. It describes the question of how to interpret the gaze-following ability of infants who do not yet understand the referential nature of looking. The chapter also argues that early gaze reflects the former, not the latter, form of social understanding. One possibility is that early gaze-following is an unrelated skill controlled by reflexive orienting of attention which just happens to have the same outward appearance as later endogenously controlled gaze-following. If early gaze-following is part of the developmental process of understanding others' intentions and acquiring joint attention, then gaze-following at 6 months should also be related to measures of joint attention and language. A great deal of energy has gone into validating the mentalistic interpretation of gaze-following. Gaze-following was also evaluated with different criteria.
