ABSTRACT
In the world of the prelinguistic infant an adult's direction of gaze exerts a powerful effect in redirecting the infant's visual attention. The adult's behaviour serves to signal potentially interesting objects and events to the baby. Our experiments suggest that three cognitive mechanisms are implicated in the comprehension of the adult's head and eye movements between 6 and 18 months. These we call the "ecological," the "geometric," and the "representational" mechanisms of looking where someone else is looking. This chapter explores the relationship in development between the signalling function of joint visual attention and the infant's comprehension and production of manual pointing.
