Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior

Abstract

Young children's visual environments are dynamic, changing moment-by-moment as children physically and visually explore spaces and objects and interact with people around them. Headmounted eye tracking offers a unique opportunity to capture children's dynamic egocentric views and how they allocate visual attention within those views. This protocol provides guiding principles and practical recommendations for researchers using head-mounted eye trackers in both laboratory and more naturalistic settings. Head-mounted eye tracking complements other experimental methods by enhancing opportunities for data collection in more ecologically valid contexts through increased portability and freedom of head and body movements compared to screen-based eye tracking. This protocol can also be integrated with other technologies, such as motion tracking and heart-rate monitoring, to provide a high-density multimodal dataset for examining natural behavior, learning, and development than previously possible. This paper illustrates the types of data generated from head-mounted eye tracking in a study designed to investigate visual attention in one natural context for toddlers: free-flowing toy play with a parent. Successful use of this protocol will allow researchers to collect data that can be used to answer questions not only about visual attention, but also about a broad range of other perceptual, cognitive, and social skills and their development.

Self‐generated variability in object images predicts vocabulary growth

“…Each ROI was coded manually, frame by frame, by watching the infant-view video with crosshairs indicating gaze direction ( Figure 2b) and annotating when the crosshairs indicating infant gaze overlapped any portion of an object and which object (Slone et al, 2018). These ROIs were coded by highly trained coders who code this variable for many different experiments and who were naïve with respect to the research questions.…”

“…These ROIs were coded by highly trained coders who code this variable for many different experiments and who were naïve with respect to the research questions. Each ROI was coded manually, frame by frame, by watching the infant-view video with crosshairs indicating gaze direction ( Figure 2b) and annotating when the crosshairs indicating infant gaze overlapped any portion of an object and which object (Slone et al, 2018). A second coder independently coded a randomly selected 10% of the frames in the corpus, with the inter-coder reliability ranging from 82% to 95% (Cohen's kappa = 0.81).…”

Head and body structure infants’ visual experiences during mobile, naturalistic play

“…Like adults, infants move their eyes to look at objects while reaching [15,16]. Infants may selectively attend to objects to engage in object manipulation and explore object properties [15,[17][18][19][20]. Second, body posture (e.g., prone, sitting, and upright) shapes infants' visual attention [21][22][23][24].…”

Finding Structure in Time: Visualizing and Analyzing Behavioral Time Series

“…After the experiment, eye-tracking data, video recordings and speech recordings were synchronized and calibrated. Trained coders provided frame-by-frame annotations indicating all instances of parents and infants gaze and manual contact with each of the three objects (Slone et al, 2018). Three ROI were used for all the behavioral streams: the three toys.…”