Active Observers: Three-Year-Olds Show Signature Gaze Patterns When Seeking Cues of Third-Party Joint Attention

Joint attention is a cornerstone of early social cognition and learning. While children’s own engagement in joint attention has been extensively studied, less is known about how they observe joint attention between others. In line with active learning accounts, this study investigated children’s active engagement during the observational process. We designed a novel, process-sensitive eye-tracking paradigm to examine children’s attentional dynamics when searching for cues of third-party joint attention. Thirty-six 3-year-old children completed a two-phase task. In the induction phase, children watched videos designed to manipulate expectations about the attentional relationship between two adults: joint (face-to-face, verbal emphasis on attending together), parallel (back-to-back, verbal emphasis on attending independently), or neutral control (facing forward, attentional relation unspecified). In the subsequent test phase, we recorded children’s gaze as they viewed images of the same actors looking at an object, ambiguous with respect to their interpersonal relationship. The key question was whether the induction of joint attention would shape children’s visual exploration of the following test scenes. Gaze paths were transformed into character strings, from which recurring subpatterns were extracted and semantically grouped. We found more frequent face-to-face gaze shifts and triadic gaze shifts between the actors’ faces and the target object in the joint compared to the parallel attention condition. Shifts to distractors were more frequent in the parallel attention condition. Together, these results reveal distinct gaze patterns when expecting joint attention, indicating that children are active observers who strategically seek meaningful cues in others’ interactions.