Active vision in passive locomotion: real‐world free viewing in infants and adults

Abstract

Visual exploration in infants and adults has been studied using two very different paradigms: free viewing of flat screen displays in desk-mounted eye-tracking studies and real world visual guidance of action in head-mounted eye-tracking studies. To test whether classic findings from screen-based studies generalize to real world visual exploration and to compare natural visual exploration in infants and adults, we tested observers in a new paradigm that combines critical aspects of both previous techniques: free viewing during real world visual exploration. Mothers and their 9-month-old infants wore head-mounted eye trackers while mothers carried their infants in a forward-facing infant carrier through a series of indoor hallways. Demands for visual guidance of action were minimal in mothers and absent for infants, so both engaged in free viewing while moving through the environment. Similar to screen-based studies, during free viewing in the real world low-level saliency was related to gaze direction. In contrast to screen-based studies, only infants—not adults—were biased to look at people, participants of both ages did not show a classic center bias, and mothers and infants did not display high levels of inter-observer consistency. Results indicate that several aspects of visual exploration of a flat screen display do not generalize to visual exploration in the real world.

Contributions of Look Duration and Gaze Shift Patterns to Infants’ Novelty Preferences

“…The possibility that perseverative looking is dependent on behavioral or motor memories for the direction of the last look fits with other accounts of early spatial memory suggesting that gaze direction, dependent on head and/or eye movements, often reflects egocentric or body-centered memories of spatial location during the first year (Acredolo, 1990; Gilmore & Johnson, 1998;Kushiro, Taga, & Watanabe, 2007; for more on embodied spatial representations during infancy, see Bremner, Holmes, & Spence, 2008). Infants in the current study typically moved their head along with their eyes during gaze shifts or when looking back to the display as reported elsewhere (Kretch & Adolph, 2015;Richards & Hunter, 1997), and memory for these motor activities may have driven perseverations independently from memory for where novel stimuli last appeared. As infants produced multiple left or multiple right looks (i.e., "going back"), memories for looks in that direction strengthened, and these memories in turn led to perseverative looking becoming the dominant behavior rather than gaze shifts.…”

Real‐world scene perception in infants: What factors guide attention allocation?

“…Experiments that examine the interactions between these factors, including social information (Amso et al, ; Frank et al, , ) and motor activity (cf. Kretch & Adolph, ), and their effects on attentional processing are essential to move developmental theories of attention forward.…”

Graspable Objects Grab Attention More Than Images Do

“…Whether similar signatures of ‘realness’ can be elicited using immersive virtual reality (VR) (Wamain, Gabrielli, & Coello, 2016) or augmented reality (AR) displays –particularly those that allow goal-directed actions with representations, is a question of empirical and philosophical importance (Wamain et al, 2016). Because normal development in humans (Kretch & Adolph, 2015) and animals (Held & Hein, 1963) relies on having active manual control on the environment in response to visual inputs, studying vision with naturalistic graspable objects will yield important insights into the relationship between an active observer and its physical environment.…”