Discussion
Experiment 3 demonstrates that in the absence of a social give-and-take interaction, 12-montholds
did not pay more attention to the give-me gesture than to the inverted hand shape when both
were presented side by side. Instead, we found an attentional preference for the inverted hand shape.
One possible explanation is that the data reflect a novelty preference, indicating differential processing
for the two gestures.
The findings from Experiment 3 indicate that shorter gaze latencies found in Experiment 1 were
not due to a priming effect based on an attentional bias for the give-me gesture. It is, of course, possible
that the attentional preference suggested above is present only in even more complex social situations
when there is a human holding the ball. That is, there might be an attentional preference
toward give-me gestures when there is another human agent holding an object that could be transferred.
To investigate the possibility of an attentional preference more thoroughly, a fourth experiment
was conducted. Here the two hands (give-me gesture and inverted hand shape) were once
more presented simultaneously in the presence of a moving ball; however, this time a hand moved
the ball back and forth. Experiment 4 investigated whether the presence of a human holding the ball
triggers more attentional load to the give-me gesture relative to the inverted hand shape. As in Experiment
3, looking times at the two hands were the dependent variables.