Seeing and looking: Evidence for developmental and stimulus-dependent changes in infant scanning efficiency

Though previous work has examined infant attention across a variety of tasks, less is known about the individual saccades and fixations that make up each bout of attention, and how individual differences in saccade and fixation patterns (i.e., scanning efficiency) change with development, scene cont...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-09, Vol.17 (9), p.e0274113-e0274113
Main Authors: Ross-Sheehy, Shannon, Eschman, Bret, Reynolds, Esther E
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amplitudes
Babies
Biology and Life Sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive ability
Complexity
Design
Efficiency
Experiments
Eye movements
Fixation
Health aspects
Infants
Infants (Newborn)
Information processing
Medical examination
Medicine and Health Sciences
People and Places
Saccadic eye movements
Scanning
Social Sciences
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Though previous work has examined infant attention across a variety of tasks, less is known about the individual saccades and fixations that make up each bout of attention, and how individual differences in saccade and fixation patterns (i.e., scanning efficiency) change with development, scene content and perceptual load. To address this, infants between the ages of 5 and 11 months were assessed longitudinally (Experiment 1) and cross-sectionally (Experiment 2). Scanning efficiency (fixation duration, saccade rate, saccade amplitude, and saccade velocity) was assessed while infants viewed six quasi-naturalistic scenes that varied in content (social or non-social) and scene complexity (3, 6 or 9 people/objects). Results from Experiment 1 revealed moderate to strong stability of individual differences in saccade rate, mean fixation duration, and saccade amplitude, and both experiments revealed 5-month-old infants to make larger, faster, and more frequent saccades than older infants. Scanning efficiency was assessed as the relation between fixation duration and saccade amplitude, and results revealed 11-month-olds to have high scanning efficiency across all scenes. However, scanning efficiency also varied with scene content, such that all infants showing higher scanning efficiency when viewing social scenes, and more complex scenes. These results suggest both developmental and stimulus-dependent changes in scanning efficiency, and further highlight the use of saccade and fixation metrics as a sensitive indicator of cognitive processing.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0274113