Abstract
This study explored children’s development in comprehending four types of pointing gestures with different familiarity. Our aim was to highlight human infants’ pointing comprehension abilities under the same conditions used for various animal species. Sixteen children were tested longitudinally in a two-choice task from 1 year of age. At the age of 12 and 14 months, infants did not exceed chance level with either of the gestures used. Infants were successful with distal pointing and long cross-pointing at the age of 16 months. By the age of 18 months, infants showed a high success rate with the less familiar gestures (forward cross-pointing and far pointing) as well. Their skills at this older age show close similarity with those demonstrated previously by dogs when using exactly the same testing procedures. Our longitudinal studies also revealed that in a few infants, the ability to comprehend pointing gestures is already apparent before 16 months of age. In general, we found large individual variation. This has been described for a variety of cognitive skills in human development and seems to be typical for pointing comprehension as well.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by grants received from the Hungarian Science Fund (OTKA 049615), the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (F01/031) and an EU FP6 NEST 012787 grant. We are grateful to all of the infants and their parents for their participation, patience and support throughout the study. We are also very grateful to C. P. West for correcting the English of the manuscript. An ESF Research Networking Program titled ‘The Evolution of Social Cognition: Comparisons and integration across a wide range of human and non-human animal species’ (COMPCOG) also supported this research.
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Pfandler, E., Lakatos, G. & Miklósi, Á. Eighteen-month-old human infants show intensive development in comprehension of different types of pointing gestures. Anim Cogn 16, 711–719 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-013-0606-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-013-0606-2