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Article
Temperament Moderates Responsiveness to Joint Attention in 11-Month-Old Infants
Infant Behavior and Development
  • James T. Todd, Florida International University
  • Wallace E. Dixon, Jr., East Tennessee State University
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-1-2010
Description

The present study investigates the relationship between individual differences in children's temperament and their responsiveness to joint attention. Twenty-five 11-month-old children (12 girls and 13 boys) were presented with a gaze-following task in a laboratory setting, and parent reports of temperament were collected. Findings indicate that children's ability to correctly follow an experimenter's gaze differed as a function of individual temperament predispositions. Children high in perceptual sensitivity and negative affect engaged in relatively less frequent gaze-following, consistent with reports from previous research. However analysis of the dimension of orienting/effortful control produced an unexpected finding; that children low in effortful control were relatively more likely to respond to joint attentional bids. Overall, these findings are consistent with a view of temperament as a moderator of children's engagement in joint attention, and raise the possibility that joint attention may be a mechanism underlying previous reports of temperament–language relationships.

Disciplines
Citation Information
James T. Todd and Wallace E. Dixon. "Temperament Moderates Responsiveness to Joint Attention in 11-Month-Old Infants" Infant Behavior and Development Vol. 33 Iss. 3 (2010) p. 297 - 308 ISSN: 0163-6383
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/wallace-dixon/32/