Caregivers and strangers: The influence of familiarity on gaze following and learning

• No differences were seen in how infants followed their caregivers’ and strangers’ gaze to objects as they were labeled.
• Individual infants’ gaze following from the caregiver and the stranger to the labeled objects were not correlated.
• Learning was only evident in the caregiver condition and only in infants most skilled at following their caregivers’ gaze.

This study examines how social cues facilitate learning by manipulating the familiarity of a social cue. Participants were forty-nine infants between 12–18 months. Infants were taught a novel label for a novel object under two pre-recorded gaze conditions—one in which the caregiver was seen gazing at a novel object while a verbal label was played, and one in which a stranger was seen gazing at a novel object while a verbal label was played. Learning was only evident in the caregiver condition and only in the infants most skilled at following their caregivers’ gaze. The results of the current study suggest that both the familiarity of the cuer and the infant’s own ability to follow the gaze of the cuer play important roles in the infant’s learning in this task.