An eye tracking investigation of developmental change in bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes

This study examined the contribution of visual salience to bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes across development. We eye tracked participants 4 months to 24 years of age as they freely viewed 16 natural scenes, all of which had faces in them. In half, the face was als...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2014-01, Vol.9 (1), p.e85701-e85701
Main Authors: Amso, Dima, Haas, Sara, Markant, Julie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Age
Analysis of Variance
Attention
Attention - physiology
Babies
Child
Child development
Child, Preschool
Cognition & reasoning
Eye movements
Eye Movements - physiology
Face
Female
Humans
Infant
Linguistics
Male
Medicine
Newborn babies
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Photic Stimulation - methods
Salience
Siblings
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Socioeconomic factors
Studies
Take-all disease
Visual aspects
Visual perception
Visual Perception - physiology
Young Adult
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Summary:This study examined the contribution of visual salience to bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes across development. We eye tracked participants 4 months to 24 years of age as they freely viewed 16 natural scenes, all of which had faces in them. In half, the face was also the winner-take-all salient area in the display as determined by the MATLAB SaliencyToolbox. In the other half, a random location was the winner-take-all salient area in the display and the face was visually non-salient. We found that proportion of attended faces, in the first second of scene viewing, improved after the first year. Visually salient faces attracted bottom-up attention orienting more than non-salient faces reliably and robustly only after infancy. Preliminary data indicate that this shift to use of visual salience to guide bottom-up attention orienting after infancy may be a function of stabilization of visual skills. Moreover, sociodemographic factors including number of siblings in the home and family income were agents of developmental change in orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes in infancy.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0085701