What’s In a Gaze?
We
bet you think your baby has gorgeous eyes and that you spent many hours gazing
into them. Well, you may or may not be pleased to know
that it isn’t a coincidence that you think that – there are developmental and
psychological purposes behind it.
1.
If you look at a model of a baby’s skull, you’ll notice that their eyes are
initially much bigger in relation to the rest of the head. The eyes are
initially the main tool that your baby uses to engage with the world. The first
thing is that their large diameter enables your baby to absorb as much
information as possible about their surroundings.
2.
While absorbing information is obviously very important for survival, what’s
even more important for survival is
bonding, and your baby’s eyes are how they do it. Bonding ensures a baby’s
survival, because it makes sure that their parent/carer will love them and want to attend to their every need. Given
that they can’t attend to any of
their own needs at all, it’s basically priority number 1 that someone reliably
and consistently wants to do this for
them, even in the face of how very needy
they are and how difficult that is for those caring for them. If you think
about it, the amount that babies need their parents is constant and exhausting
in SO many ways that there needs to be a foolproof biological mechanism that
ensures their needs are met, even when their parent is exhausted, stressed and
anxious.
Bonding
is therefore the number one key to survival for your baby, and bonding is a two
way process, with both of you playing your part in creating the bond that
exists between you.
Your
baby’s eyes are vital for the whole process. They can’t bond through any of the
normal ways we bond as adults – by saying or doing nice things, by expressing
how much they care, by being there for us, but they can bond with us by making
sure we find them absolutely irresistible. Notice how your baby’s eyes are
proportionally bigger than the rest of their facial features – this is to make
them seem more attractive to adults (have you ever noticed how in animations,
characters are usually drawn with bigger eyes so that they seem cuter? Have you
noticed how puppies and kittens have bigger eyes than adult animals? The
concept is the same there too, for their parents – and for us!). With their big
baby eyes, you are more likely to be drawn to gazing into them and developing a
deep bond with them.
Even as adults, we experience intimacy by looking into
someone’s eyes, so your baby’s eyes represent their main tool for creating
intimacy quickly.
But
it doesn’t end there. Once you’re finding them irresistible, they need to keep
your (bonding) attention, and they way they do that is through gazing back at
you. Your baby will gaze intently back at you because they are programmed to
recognise and respond to faces from birth. We are born with relatively few
cognitive processes that are hardwired into our brains, but face recognition is
one of them - so that your face catches their attention, causing them to play
their part in bonding by looking at (i.e. responding to your gaze). By engaging
with you and gazing into your eyes at the same time that you’re drawn to doing
the same with them, a reciprocal bond will form between you. Research showed us
long ago that babies who are just 9 minutes old pay more attention to faces
than other shapes[1]
and that they engage with faces in a unique way.
It’s also been shown that
babies aged just two days can distinguish their mother’s face from a stranger’s
face.[2]
If
we’re talking cognitive development, your baby’s gaze is also very important
there. The ability to gaze at something comes first. Then the ability to pay attention to something develops, which
leads to the ability to actually focus,
or concentrate on it. The bonding gaze between you and your baby is actually
also a key tool in helping their cognitive development along, because from
gazing at you, your baby learns to follow your gaze, so that you develop the
ability jointly gaze at something together. When your baby follows where you
look (e.g. at a toy or an object of interest) you’re teaching them how to focus
on other objects and to pay attention to them, without even knowing it. You’re
teaching them about the world. So the bond between you has even more of a
developmental functions than simply to make sure they’re cared for.
It also
means that the more time you spend engaging with them, the more time you’ll
spend ‘leading’ their gaze, ‘teaching’ them how to focus their attention on
something in the outside world and become familiar with it.
In
the outside world, babies are attracted to different colours and visual
effects, all of which are designed to help particular areas of cognition to develop
at different times. This also means that food needs to be visually exciting and
interesting, so that your baby wants to engage with it (yeah, we were always
going to get a food reference in there!). Beige foods, for example, are not
visually exciting, and will not catch your baby’s attention. The things that do
catch your baby’s attention are going to become familiar more quickly because
your baby wants to explore them and therefore spends more time in contact with
them. The looks that pass between you and other objects help things to catch
their attention.
But
even that’s not all. Having a joint
gaze, and then focusing joint attention on something is extremely important for
language development skills, like comprehension, language production and word
learning. Social developmental skills, like learning how refer to other people
and how to have normal relationships, also comes from joint attention. So you
might think: what’s in a gaze? But the answer is…a LOT!
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| image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net |
[1]
Goren, C.C., Sarty, M. and Wu, P.Y.K. (1975). Visual following and pattern discrimination
of face-like stimuli by newborn infants. Pediatrics,
56, 544-549.
[2]
Bushnell, I.W.R, Sai, F. and Mullin, J.T. (1989). Neonatal recognition of the
mother’s face. British Journal of
Developmental Psychology, 7, 3-15.
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set our little ones a good example and encourage sharing. We don't mind
you using any of the information, recipes and tips from our website, all
we ask is that you credit us hard-working mummies here at Yummy
Discoveries.
Thank you x
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