Infant Eye Gaze While Viewing Dynamic Faces

Abstract

Research using eye tracking methods has revealed that when viewing faces, between 6 to 10 months of age, infants begin to shift visual attention from the eye region to the mouth region. Moreover, this shift varies with stimulus characteristics and infants’ experience with faces and languages. The current study examined the eye movements of a racially diverse sample of 98 infants between 7.5 and 10.5 months of age as they viewed movies of White and Asian American women reciting a nursery rhyme (the auditory component of the movies was replaced with music to eliminate the influence of the speech on infants’ looking behavior). Using an analytic approach inspired by the multiverse analysis approach, several measures from infants’ eye gaze were examined to identify patterns that were robust across different analyses. Although in general infants preferred the lower regions of the faces, i.e., the region containing the mouth, this preference depended on the stimulus characteristics and was stronger for infants whose typical experience included faces of more races and for infants who were exposed to multiple languages. These results show how we can leverage the richness of eye tracking data with infants to add to our understanding of the factors that influence infants’ visual exploration of faces.

Bilingual adaptations in early development

“…[8] ). Indeed, 7-to 10-month-old infants are more likely to look at the mouth area if they are from bilingual homes than monolingual homes [9] . Moreover, developing cognitive and sensorimotor abilities may enable the bilingual infant to rapidly switch attention between a speaker's mouth and competing stimuli such as an object the infant is handling or the speaker's eyes, gaze, and gestures.…”

Understanding developmental cascades and experience: Diversity matters

“…Infants' everyday experience looking at the faces in their community apparently had a cascading effect on their developing attention to faces. A separate study with an ethnically and racially diverse sample of 8‐ to 10‐month‐old infants from the Sacramento Valley showed a similar effect (Oakes et al., 2021). In this case, infants from the same community looked differently at Asian and White women's faces as a function of the level of diversity in their own daily experience with faces.…”

“…Significant insight can be gained by simply developing a questionnaire about infants' experiences. We have used this approach to examine how infants' responding varies as a function of their motor development (Nelson & Oakes, 2021), exposure to pets (Hurley et al., 2010; Hurley & Oakes, 2018; Kovack‐Lesh et al., 2008, 2012), and face experience (DeBolt & Oakes, 2023; Oakes et al., 2021). Although such questionnaires provide only an approximation of infants' experience, and only lend themselves to correlational conclusions, they are an important step in discovering how diversity of experience relates to development.…”

“May I Grab Your Attention?”: An Investigation Into Infants' Visual Preferences for Handled Objects Using Lookit as an Online Platform for Data Collection

“…Infants were recruited via the Lookit recruiter (i.e., emails were sent to families with accounts in Lookit), social media (ads on Facebook), and emails to families who had expressed interest in participation (see Oakes et al, 2021 for details regarding identification and recruitment of infant participants). All families residing in the US received a $5 Amazon gift card 1 .…”