Look at Grandma! Joint visual attention over video chat during the COVID-19 pandemic

Authors

• Lauren Myers, Lafayette College
• Gabrielle Strouse, University of South DakotaFollow
• Elisabeth McClure, Lego Foundation
• Krystyna R. Keller, Lafayette College
• Lucinda I. Neely, Lafayette College
• Isabella Stoto, Lafayette College
• Nithya S. Vadakattu, Vanderbilt University
• Erin D. Kim, Vanderbilt University
• Georgene Troseth, Vanderbilt University
• Rachel Barr, Georgetown University
• Jennifer Zosh, Pennsylvania State University - Brandywine

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-12-2024

Division

School of Education Counseling and Psychology in Education

Keywords

joint visual attention, video chat, digital media, co-viewing, sensitivity

Disciplines

Developmental Psychology

Abstract

Social interactions are crucial for many aspects of development. One developmentally important milestone is joint visual attention (JVA), or shared attention between child and adult on an object, person, or event. Adults support infants’ development of JVA by structuring the input they receive, with the goal of infants learning to use JVA to communicate. When family members are separated from the infants in their lives, video chat sessions between children and distant relatives allow for shared back-and-forth interaction (turn taking) across the screen, but JVA is complicated by screen mediation. During video chat, when a participant is looking or pointing at the screen to something in the other person’s environment, there is no line of sight that can be followed to their object of focus. Sensitive caregivers in the remote and local environment with the infant may be able to structure the interactions to support infants in using JVA to communicate across screens. We observed naturalistic video chat interactions longitudinally from 50 triads (infant, co-viewing parent, remote grandmother). Longitudinal growth models showed that JVA rate changes with child age (4 to 20 months). Furthermore, grandmother sensitivity predicted JVA rate and infant attention. More complex sessions (sessions involving more people, those with greater proportion of across-screen JVA, and those where infants initiated more of the JVA) resulted in lower amounts of JVA-per-minute, and evidence of family-level individual differences emerged in all models. We discuss the potential of video chat to enhance communication for separated families in the digital world.

Publication Title

Infant Behavior and Development

Volume

75

Issue

101934

DOI

10.1016/j.infbeh.2024.101934

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Comments

Supplemental resources available at https://osf.io/kvd97/

Recommended Citation

Myers, L. J., Strouse, G. A., McClure, E. R., Keller, K. R., Neely, L. I., Stoto, I., Vadakattu, N. S., Kim, E., Troseth, G. L., Barr, R., & Zosh, J. M. (2024). Look at Grandma! Joint visual attention over video chat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Infant Behavior and Development, 75, 101934. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2024.101934