Babies Learn Through Eye Contact: Study Links Gaze to Brain Development

Scientists from the University of Cambridge and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have found that eye contact plays a crucial role in how infants learn language. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

When a baby looks into the eyes of a person who is speaking, the infant's brain activity synchronizes with that of the adult, helping the child identify which information is worth remembering.

From the first months of life, infants are surrounded by a vast amount of sounds and visual stimuli competing for their attention. To determine what is important to learn, they rely on social cues such as eye contact, the exaggerated intonation of infant-directed speech, smiles, and hearing their own name.

Previous studies had already shown that eye contact causes the brain waves of infants and adults to become more synchronized. The new research demonstrates that this synchronization is directly linked to learning.

In the experiment, 42 infants aged 8 to 10 months from the United Kingdom and Singapore listened to three artificial languages made up of repeating syllable sequences. Each language was presented by the same speaker on a screen, but under different conditions: in one, the speaker's eyes were fully visible; in another, they were partially obscured by glasses; and in the third, they were completely hidden.

The researchers monitored the infants' brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) and then tested how well they had learned the language patterns.

The results showed that the babies were not simply absorbing everything they heard. They successfully learned only the language presented when they could clearly see the speaker's eyes. Moreover, the degree of synchronization between the infant's and the adult's brain waves was the strongest predictor of successful learning.

"Even when infants were looking attentively at the screen, without eye contact the information simply passed them by," said Dr. Kayleigh Claxton of the University of Cambridge. According to her, brain synchronization indicates that infants are actively selecting what to pay attention to.

The effect was observed equally in infants from both the United Kingdom and Singapore, suggesting that it is universal rather than culture-specific. However, the researchers note that eye contact is only one way of signaling that information is important. In different cultures, other social cues—such as smiling, gestures, or calling a child by name—may serve a similar function.

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