Look at Grandma! Joint visual attention over video chat during the COVID-19 pandemic

Social interactions are crucial for many aspects of development. One developmentally important milestone is joint visual attention (JVA), or shared attention between child and adult on an object, person, or event. Adults support infants’ development of JVA by structuring the input they receive, with the goal of infants learning to use JVA to communicate. When family members are separated from the infants in their lives, video chat sessions between children and distant relatives allow for shared back-and-forth turn taking interaction across the screen, but JVA is complicated by screen mediation. During video chat, when a participant is looking or pointing at the screen to something in the other person’s environment, there is no line of sight that can be followed to their object of focus. Sensitive caregivers in the remote and local environment with the infant may be able to structure interactions to support infants in using JVA to communicate across screens. We observed naturalistic video chat interactions longitudinally from 50 triads (infant, co-viewing parent, remote grandmother). Longitudinal growth models showed that JVA rate changes with child age (4 to 20 months). Furthermore, grandmother sensitivity predicted JVA rate and infant attention. More complex sessions (sessions involving more people, those with a greater proportion of across-screen JVA, and those where infants initiated more of the JVA) resulted in lower amounts of JVA-per-minute, and evidence of family-level individual differences emerged in all models. We discuss the potential of video chat to enhance communication for separated families in the digital world.