The ability to share joint attention is a crucial precursor to normal emotional and cognitive development.  One of the key benefits of joint attention is the ability to discriminate socially meaningful events, particularly socially meaningful biological movement and then use that information to foster social communication.  However, the direct benefits of joint attention on objects being encoded has yet to be fully elaborated. The purpose of our study is to measure the extent to which joint attention supports memory encoding and to which participants, when given a choice, show discrimination in their memory encoding. 

Our hypothesis was that joint attention confers a special advantage in recognition memory.  We used a computerized face that provided gaze related cues.  In each trial, gaze was directed at one out of four simultaneously presented visual objects that were randomly distributed in four quadrants of the screen, while one other object (distractor) was highlighted by a flashing box. Participants showed a significantly higher recognition rate for gaze-directed objects than for distractors.  Reaction time for the gaze directed objects was slower than for the distractors.  These findings demonstrate that participants’ memory encoding was enhanced by another’s gaze direction.