The volume organizes their contributions along three main themes: definitional concerns, such as the question of whether or not joint attention should be understood as an irreducibly basic state, Joint attention – parents’ and children’s coordinated attention to each other and to a third object or event – is claimed by many researchers to play a critical role in early word learning., Joint attention is an early-emerging and uniquely human capacity that lies at the foundation of many other capacities of humans, such as language and the understanding of other minds., This chapter describes four components of joint attention: (1) detection of a social partner, (2) detection of a shift of another’s attention, (3) shifting one’s own attention to match the other’s, and (4) monitoring the relationship between one’s own and another’s attention on a third entity., Psychology Definition of JOINT ATTENTION: two or more people's attention focused on an object or action., The volume organizes their contributions along three main themes: definitional concerns, such as the question of whether or not joint attention should be understood as an irreducibly basic state of mind; processes and mechanisms obtaining on both the neural and behavioral levels; and the functional significance of joint attention, in particular .