Infants’ Looking to Surprising Events: When Eye-Tracking Reveals More than Looking Time

Abstract

Research on infants’ reasoning abilities often rely on looking times, which are longer to surprising and unexpected visual scenes compared to unsurprising and expected ones. Few researchers have examined more precise visual scanning patterns in these scenes, and so, here, we recorded 8- to 11-month-olds’ gaze with an eye tracker as we presented a sampling event whose outcome was either surprising, neutral, or unsurprising: A red (or yellow) ball was drawn from one of three visible containers populated 0%, 50%, or 100% with identically colored balls. When measuring looking time to the whole scene, infants were insensitive to the likelihood of the sampling event, replicating failures in similar paradigms. Nevertheless, a new analysis of visual scanning showed that infants did spend more time fixating specific areas-of-interest as a function of the event likelihood. The drawn ball and its associated container attracted more looking than the other containers in the 0% condition, but this pattern was weaker in the 50% condition, and even less strong in the 100% condition. Results suggest that measuring where infants look may be more sensitive than simply how much looking there is to the whole scene. The advantages of eye tracking measures over traditional looking measures are discussed.

Size and orientation cue figure-ground segregation in infants

“…For example, given the arguments of Hebb (1949) that representations of visual images are constructed from the eye movements deployed by infants during scanning of those images, it may be that infant fixations of the familiarization stimuli would be concentrated on the portions of the stimuli perceived by adults to be the figural regions. Use of an eye-tracking procedure would thus provide a potentially enlightening supplement to the looking-time data reported here (Yeung, Denison, & Johnson, 2016).…”

Unattended Emotional Prosody Affects Visual Processing of Facial Expressions in Mandarin-Speaking Chinese: A Comparison With English-Speaking Canadians

“…As a result, compared to their Western counterparts, individuals from the harmony-seeking culture may have less exposure to openly expressed anger, rendering angry cues more novel to them. This perceived novelty may elicit preferential visual processing, indicated by more frequent fixations and longer duration (e.g., Horstmann & Herwig, 2016; Yeung et al, 2016). Alternatively, when anger is present in the context of a harmony-seeking culture, it may signify violation of social norms that needs immediate attention and solution.…”

Exploring determinants of consumers' attitudes toward real-time bidding (RTB) advertising

“…In the field of psychology, surprise is the initial neuro-response to unexpectedness in the central nervous system (Brown and Kulik, 1977;Coluccia et al, 2010) and may result in greater attention to an emotionally arousing event (Itti and Baldi, 2009). Surprise may also stimulate individuals' curiosity about the event and motivate exploration and cognitive appraisal of the event (Yeung et al, 2016).…”

“…In other words, the individual relies on affect or feelings to make judgments due to the belief that they provide valuable information (Gouaux, 1971;Clore and Huntsinger, 2009). Thus, an individual experiencing a stimulus of high activation, such as surprise, would cognitively evaluate the situation (Yeung et al, 2016) and utilize the information gained to form judgments in decisionmaking processes. In RTB advertising, advertisements typically "follow" the internet user and often appear on websites unrelated to the product in the advertisement.…”