Eye contact helps infants 'tune in' to speaker's brainwaves and learn language
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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.
Victoria Leong and colleagues at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, have previously shown that when an infant and adult make eye contact, their brainwaves synchronize with each other.
Now, in a study published in Nature Communications, they have shown that eye contact helps the baby decide what is important, acting as a "switch" to synchronize their brainwaves with those of the speaker and help them learn.
Testing three made-up languages
To do this, the team had infants in both countries listen to three nonsense languages formed from triplets of syllables repeated over and over again. Each of these languages was paired with a speaker who appeared on a screen wearing glasses—in one setup, her glasses were clear; in a second, her glasses were partially shaded, making it more difficult to see her eyes; and in the third, her glasses were dark, making it impossible to see her eyes. The same speaker was used for all three languages.
During the first part of the experiment, when the infants were being familiarized with the languages, the team examined the infants' brainwaves using electroencephalography (EEG), which measures patterns of brain electrical activity via electrodes in a skull cap worn by the participants. Forty-two infants ages 8–10 months from the UK and Singapore took part in this test. The researchers had also recorded the brainwave patterns of the speaker while she spoke the languages for the videos.
To test whether the infants had learned the language, the speaker then presented them with individual phrases from the different languages as well as new made-up words. Infants would be expected to spend more time looking at speakers using an unfamiliar language than at one they were familiar with.
Only visible eyes triggered learning
Leong, from the School of Social Sciences at NTU and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Cambridge, said, "We let the infants listen to all three languages and it turned out they were selective in what they learned. They're not just passive sponges. They heard all three languages, but only learned the one, which was when they could see the speaker's eyes."
The researchers found that when a baby was learning the language, their brainwaves were more likely to be in sync with those of the speaker. In fact, the level of synchrony was more important for predicting learning than even the brain activity of the infants themselves. But crucially, brain activity was synchronized only when the baby could fully see the speaker's eyes.
The infants tended to look at the screen for the same amount of time, regardless of whether they could see the speaker's eyes, but eye contact was crucial for helping the baby determine which language was important.
Dr. Kaili Clackson from the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge said, "Even when the infants seemed to be staring at a screen attentively, unless there was eye contact, nothing was going in—the information washed over them. The brain synchrony shows that it's a selection process."
Social cues beyond eye contact
The researchers found this phenomenon to be true in both Cambridge and Singapore, suggesting it is universal, not culture-specific. However, in Singapore, infants spent more time looking at the speaker in general—possibly because the speaker's ethnicity was less familiar to them and thus more novel—though this did not affect learning.
Eye contact is one of the social signals that communicate intention to the listener. However, there are other social cues that do this, too, such as smiling, pointing and using the infant's name. These may be particularly important in cultures where eye contact between a child and adult is less important—or even frowned upon, as it is in some Arabic countries.
Clackson added, "These cues are really powerful because when you preface new information with them, they tell the baby: this is important, you need to listen."
Attention starts with engagement
The researchers say they hope the findings will make parents more aware of the need to engage actively with their children.
"As parents, we need to be conscious of the need to use social cues like eye contact and calling your child's name, as these cues don't just focus your child's attention, they activate the learning process," Leong said.
"If you're on your phone and distracted when you're trying to give them instructions or teach them something, they're less likely to take it seriously or learn than if you put your phone down and look them in the eye. This is an important way of signaling your intentionality, your seriousness, that you want them to pay attention and learn something."
Publication details
Wei Zhang et al, Adult-to-infant unidirectional neural coupling mediates selective social learning in infants from the United Kingdom and Singapore, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-75831-x
Journal information: Nature Communications
Key medical concepts
Language DevelopmentElectroencephalography
Clinical categories
PediatricsChildren's healthNeurologyPsychology & Mental health Provided by University of Cambridge Who's behind this story?
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