Social-cognitive skills between 5 and 10 months of age

Joint attention skills are an important part of human cultural learning. However, little is known about the emergence and meaning of these skills in early ontogeny. The development of, and relation among, various joint attention skills was assessed. Seventy-two 5 to 10-month-old infants were tested on a variety of joint attention tasks. Intercorrelations among these tasks were sparse, which puts into question the meaning of these various skills. In addition, the majority of infants exhibited some joint attention skill before 9 months of age, which points to a more gradual development of joint attention skills than suggested by previous research.