Looking babies in the eyes may help them learn

By Dr. Liji Thomas, MDReviewed by Lauren HardakerJul 30 2026

Looking directly at an infant may do more than capture attention. Researchers found that fully visible speaker gaze was linked to selective language learning through directed adult-to-infant neural connectivity, offering new insights into how babies identify information worth learning.

Study: Adult-to-infant unidirectional neural coupling mediates selective social learning in infants from the United Kingdom and Singapore. Image credit: mimagephotography/Shutterstock.com

Making direct eye contact with an infant may do more than capture their attention; it could help determine what they learn. A new study published in Nature Communications suggests that when an adult's eyes are fully visible, directed neural connectivity from the adult to the infant may help explain why infants selectively learn socially relevant information.

Direct gaze helps infants identify meaningful information

Infants are constantly surrounded by sights, sounds, and social signals, yet they rapidly learn which information deserves their attention. Researchers believe this ability is guided by ostensive cues; signals such as direct eye contact and infant-directed speech that indicate an adult intends to communicate. These cues have been linked to greater readiness for learning and social interaction.

When infants encounter these communicative signals, they are thought to move through a series of social decision-making stages. They first detect and interpret the social cues around them, then evaluate how relevant and trustworthy those cues are before deciding whether the information is worth learning or responding to. Despite the importance of this process, the underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood.

Direct gaze is considered one of the most powerful ostensive cues because it conveys communicative intent while also providing additional information through facial expressions. However, previous research suggests that simply looking at a speaker does not necessarily mean an infant is paying attention, and paying attention alone does not guarantee learning.

Instead, studies indicate that communicative cues work together. Infants show stronger behavioral and neural responses when an adult both looks directly at them and speaks using infant-directed speech. These findings suggest that ostensive cues do more than capture attention; they may also help infants determine which information is socially relevant and therefore worth learning.

This idea forms the basis of the social gating hypothesis, which proposes that responsive social interactions activate the neural mechanisms involved in language learning. One proposed mechanism is interpersonal neural coupling, the coordinated activity between the brains of an adult and an infant, which has been shown to increase in the presence of ostensive gaze. Direct gaze and infant-directed speech also activate brain regions involved in evaluating the relevance and value of social information, suggesting that neural coupling may play a role in selective learning.

However, it remains unclear whether this neural coupling directly supports learning or simply reflects the brain becoming synchronized with the rhythm of speech or gestures, a process known as neural entrainment. To distinguish between these possibilities, the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to separately measure adult-to-infant neural connectivity and neural entrainment while infants learned an artificial language.

EEG tracked infant responses to different gaze conditions

The researchers examined the effect of gaze as an ostensive cue in a non-interactive video setting. They studied 47 infants in the UK and Singapore to assess differences in the effects of ostensive gaze on infant learning across different cultural contexts where gaze may be interpreted differently.

Average infant age was 9.4 months. Of the 47 infants who contributed behavioral data, 42 had sufficient usable EEG data for the neural analyses. The sample included 29 infants from the UK and 18 from Singapore.

The infants were exposed to a female adult speaker teaching an artificial language. Three languages were taught, each under a different condition of adult gaze, ranging from Full through Partial to No gaze.

The speaker wore the same glasses throughout, while camera-mounted polarizing filters were adjusted so that her eyes appeared fully visible in the Full gaze condition, partly obscured in the Partial gaze condition, or completely obscured in the No gaze condition.

The investigators assessed infant attention and recorded the brain signals characteristic of entrainment and neural coupling by electroencephalography (EEG). The adult’s EEG and videos were recorded beforehand, while infant EEG was recorded as the infants watched the videos. This meant that “adult-to-infant coupling” referred to directed statistical connectivity between the prerecorded adult signal and the infants’ live EEG, rather than reciprocal, real-time brain synchrony.

Infant learning was evaluated by comparing looking time for nonwords versus words, with a statistically significant positive difference interpreted as evidence of learning.

Infants learned only when eyes were fully visible

Although the same speaker taught infants three different artificial languages, learning reached statistical significance only when the language was presented under the Full gaze condition, where the speaker's eyes were fully visible. This suggests that fully visible direct gaze may have helped infants treat the information as socially relevant and selectively learn the artificial language. By contrast, statistically significant learning was not observed in either the Partial or No gaze conditions.

When the researchers compared learning across conditions, they found that both the Full and Partial gaze conditions produced stronger learning than the No gaze condition. However, the Partial gaze result was borderline and did not reach the adjusted threshold for statistical significance, making the strongest evidence for learning specific to the Full gaze condition.

The same pattern was seen at the individual level. Infants who showed the greatest learning did so under the Full gaze condition, while no statistically significant learning was detected among the highest learners in the Partial or No gaze conditions.

Interestingly, these differences could not be explained simply by where infants were looking. Visual attention to the speaker was unrelated to both learning and gaze condition, suggesting that direct gaze influenced learning through mechanisms beyond simply attracting attention.

The researchers did observe one cultural difference: infants in Singapore spent more time looking at the speaker than infants in the UK. They suggested this could reflect an outgroup novelty effect, with the native British speaker's potentially less familiar Western facial features attracting more visual attention from the Singaporean infants. However, the study did not directly test this explanation.

Finally, parent-reported communicative gesture scores were similar in the UK and Singapore cohorts and were not associated with how well infants learned the artificial language.

Adult-to-infant connectivity associated with infant learning

The researchers also compared various measures of neural connectivity between the adult and infant: within adult, within infant, adult-to-infant, and infant-to-adult. This showed that only adult-to-infant connectivity significantly predicted infant learning above chance in the statistical model. In addition, within-infant connectivity predicted parent-reported communicative gesture scores. This was supported by cross-validation.

Neural entrainment not linked to learning

The researchers also examined whether speaker gaze affected infants’ neural entrainment to speech. This showed that neural entrainment of the infant brain to the rhythm of the speaker’s speech was statistically significant only in the Full gaze condition, but it did not predict or explain infant learning.

Adult-to-infant neural connectivity mediates gaze-related learning

Adult-to-infant neural coupling was strongest when the speaker's eyes were fully visible, compared with when they were completely obscured, although it did not differ significantly from the Partial gaze condition. Importantly, infants with stronger adult-to-infant neural coupling also showed greater learning. However, once this neural connectivity was included in the mediation analysis, the direct association between speaker gaze and learning was no longer statistically significant.

Together, these findings suggest that fully visible direct gaze may help infants identify socially relevant information worth learning, with adult-to-infant neural connectivity serving as a potential neural mechanism underlying this association. Statistical mediation analysis indicated that adult-to-infant connectivity mediated the relationship between fully visible gaze and infant learning, although the authors note that these findings are exploratory and require independent validation.

Small sample and videos warrant cautious conclusions

The study included a relatively small sample of infants, 47 for the behavioral analyses and 42 for the EEG analyses, meaning it was primarily powered to detect medium-to-large effects. The researchers note that the borderline result observed in the Partial gaze condition may become clearer in a larger study.

They also caution that the mediation findings are preliminary and do not establish causality, as the neural connectivity measure was derived using a model optimized to predict learning and therefore requires independent validation.

Another limitation is that infants watched prerecorded videos rather than interacting with a live speaker. While this standardized the language presentation across participants, it prevented natural, reciprocal communication and the use of dynamic social cues such as changing facial expressions and eye movements, limiting how well the findings translate to real-world language learning.

Finally, the neural connectivity analyses were restricted to a shared frequency band for adults and infants. Although additional analyses supported the main findings, the researchers note that this approach may not fully capture typical adult brain activity.

Direct gaze may guide what infants learn

Taken together, these findings suggest that adult-to-infant neural coupling may be a neural mechanism helping to explain why fully visible direct speaker gaze is associated with higher infant learning. According to the authors, this gaze cue may guide selective learning during early development. No statistically significant differences in the main learning or neural-connectivity effects were detected between the UK and Singapore cohorts, although the modest sample size means that this should not be taken as evidence that the effects are identical across cultures.

The authors postulate that “the adult-to-infant connectivity effectively captures social influences [of the speaker’s gaze, in this case] on early cognition, and may provide insights into social valuation decision-processes that are involved in early social learning.”

Although neural speech entrainment was affected by gaze, it was observed only in the Full gaze condition and did not predict infant learning. It was also associated with adult-to-infant coupling in the No gaze condition, perhaps suggesting greater reliance on available acoustic or rhythmic information when visual gaze cues were absent. This compensatory interpretation was not directly tested and requires further study.

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