This article aims to discuss the relevance of joint attention skills and its contribution to social cognition and language acquisition. Also, it defends mainly the idea that in the first year of life babies develops, thought joint attention and cultural insertion, a kind of intentional communication based on the first intersubjective interactions with adults. The discussion about this thematic includes divergent points of view about when the child became able to establish joint attention periods, and the moment in which that skills is consolidated. The importance of studies that investigated joint attention in the first year of life is emphasized in order to have a better understanding of that ability considering its implications to the development of communication and language.
Mother-baby interaction; joint attention; social cognition