Eye contact helps infants 'tune in' to speaker's brainwaves and learn language

edited by Sadie Harley , reviewed by Robert Egan

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Add as preferred source Melissa Ooi and her child You Ern taking part in the study into eye contact and learning. Credit: Victoria Leong/University of Cambridge Infants use eye contact with speakers to work out what to pay attention to and synchronize their brainwaves, helping them learn language, scientists in Cambridge and Singapore have shown.

Infants are surrounded by a vast range of stimuli that compete for their attention—sights, sounds and voices—and must somehow work out which things are worth paying attention to and learning from. To do this, they often rely on social cues—eye contact, "baby talk" or someone calling their name, for example—but how this helps with learning is not clear.