“Eye contact opens the gate between the perceptual systems of two individuals, and information flows,” says Joy Hirsch, the Yale neuroscientist who led the study. Another factor that seems to “gate,” or initiate, the process of learning is contingent communication: social exchanges in which the utterances of one partner are directly responsive to what the other has said. When contingent communication is absent, learning may simply fail to occur. A particularly striking example: toddlers under the age of two and a half readily learn new words and actions from a responsive adult but pick up
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