Newborn Infants Selectively Attend to Points That Refer to Objects

Recognizing that certain acts are communicative is a key requirement of the development of communicative skills. Newborn infants have been shown to selectively respond to certain ostensive cues, including mutual gaze and infant directed speech, supporting theories of the evolution of ostensive-inferential communication. That said, no study has yet examined newborns’ responses to pointing gestures, nor whether these responses are sensitive to pointing as an ostensive cue. The current study investigates whether a sensitivity to pointing is present in 5-day-old newborns by comparing newborns’ attention to a pointing hand versus a fist via a preferential looking paradigm. Across 4 Experiments with 5 conditions (N = 90), we manipulated several key factors in the communicative nature of pointing: (a) the presence versus absence of a referred-to target (Experiment 1), (b) whether the pointing entity was social versus non-social (Experiment 3), and (c) whether or not the point referred to a target by moving toward versus away from it (Experiment 4). Newborns in Experiment 1 looked longer at a pointing human hand than a non-pointing fist, but only in the presence of a target object; attention to a target-directed point was replicated in Experiment 2. In contrast, newborns in Experiments 3 and 4 showed no visual preference for an arrow over a disc when each moved toward a target, nor for a point over a fist when each moved away from a target. Together, these results are the first to suggest that newborn infants are sensitive to a key communicative gesture, pointing, and that their responses are specific to points that are both social (i.e., human hands) and communicative (i.e., referential). These findings support the existence of an experience-independent sensitivity to pointing as an ostensive signal, consistent with theories of the evolution of ostensive-inferential communication.