Joint attention, forty years of evaluations and research on models

Joint attention is when people share a common interest for an object. The first study on this phenomenon, conducted by Scaife and Bruner in 1975, considered joint attention to be the first step toward social cognition. From birth to the end of the pre-verbal period, from gaze detection to comprehension of intentionality, this article is a review of literature concerning paradigms and models that illustrate joint attention.