A hand was a shared visual target during the adult's object performance, indicating that infants' orientation to the adults' hand is a precursor stage of joint visual attention.
It also measures the infant's orientation to and engagement with social and non-social stimuli, the lability of the infant's activity and states, and the infant's consolability.
Once on the face, and having access to more visual detail, face-specific cortical mechanisms ensure that the more prototypical upright orientation maintains infants engaged with the face.
One study conducted a discharge programme that comprised an educational programme during the period of hospitalisation for parents with preterm infants, a visit and orientation about the neonatal unit by the family's health visitor, a multidisciplinary and cross-sector discharge conference, and the publication of relevant booklets for parents and healthcare providers.
From birth to the first year, infant females show stronger social orientation responses than infant males, with a stronger interest in human faces [7] [8], a greater amount of eye contact [9] [11], and more accurate imitative abilities [12].
In addition, the findings provide corroborative evidence for the importance of both motion and orientation in young infants' object segregation and for the difficulty in achieving percepts of the global form of a partly occluded object.
Orientation was counterbalanced across infants so that half the infants within each condition were familiarized to the three-quarter pose face and tested on front-facing pictures, and the other half of the infants were presented with the reverse.
But these days, during the tender, joyful hours after a baby's birth, the orientation in the maternity ward here has an additional, sobering element: a video about one of the most lethal forms of child abuse, violently shaking an infant, along with the request that parents sign an affidavit saying that they understand the risk.
Following human gaze in dogs and human infants can be considered a socially facilitated orientation response, which in object choice tasks is modulated by human-given ostensive cues.
For example, event-related potentials have been used to study habituation to sensory stimulation and orientation to novel stimuli in infants at-risk for autism (Guiraud et al., 2011) and in mice (Imada, Morris, & Wiest, 2012).
