Do 10- and 13-month-old infants provide informative gestures for their mothers in a hiding game?

► We use a new paradigm inspired by Bruner to study infant's informative gestures. ► We choose infants as young as 10 months of age to capture the emergence of informative gestures. ► From our results, ostensive gazing appear as an indicative behavior before pointing, as Bruner suggested. ► Ten-month-olds perform as 13 month-olds in the imperative context, but not in the informative one. ► Ten-month-olds may not have the ability to represent one's partner mind knowledge. Infants’ abilities to request and to inform by gazing and pointing at 10 months and 13 months of age are studied. We expect that 10-month-old children may use more gazing than pointing and that 13-month-old children perform more pointing than gazing. We hypothesize further that10-month-olds and 13-month-olds perform imperative pointing similarly, they differ when informative pointing is requested: younger infants would fail to use it. The experimental setting tests acts of indicating in a hiding game during routine and de-routinized situation by unbalancing the accessibility of information available to mother. In routines, where the mother is present during hiding, 10-month-old have a high score of correct indications by gaze as well as by pointing. In a non-routine context, 10-month-old children fail to indicate by gazing and pointing whereas 13-month-old children succeed. Results are discussed in terms of infants’ Theory of mind, more specifically the ability to represent one's partner epistemic intentions.