Egocentricity in infants’ play with familiar objects in caregiver-child interactions

The current study explored the dynamics of parent-child coordinated attention to novel and familiar objects during a play session, to examine whether parents or children are more likely to lead instances of coordinated joint attention to novel or familiar objects, and how children learn from periods of child-led or parent-led joint attention. Particularly, we investigated whether (i) parents or children lead more instances of joint attention when playing with novel relative to familiar objects, (ii) parents preferentially label novel relative to familiar objects, and (iii) children's learning of novel word-object associations is affected by object labelling frequency and children's sustained attention towards the objects. We found that not only do children lead more instances of joint attention, but, relative to their caregivers, children lead more instances of joint attention to familiar objects relative to novel objects. Parents also appeared to follow their child’s attention and labelled familiar objects more often than novel objects. Furthermore, we found no evidence for children’s recognition of the novel word-object associations. Our findings highlight the contingent nature of social interactions between caregivers and infants, with children leading and parents following their child’s lead, especially with regard to more familiar objects in the child’s environment.