Abstract
This study examined the contribution of visual salience to bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes across development. We eye tracked participants 4 months to 24 years of age as they freely viewed 16 natural scenes, all of which had faces in them. In half, the face was also the winner-take-all salient area in the display as determined by the MATLAB SaliencyToolbox. In the other half, a random location was the winner-take-all salient area in the display and the face was visually non-salient. We found that proportion of attended faces, in the first second of scene viewing, improved after the first year. Visually salient faces attracted bottom-up attention orienting more than non-salient faces reliably and robustly only after infancy. Preliminary data indicate that this shift to use of visual salience to guide bottom-up attention orienting after infancy may be a function of stabilization of visual skills. Moreover, sociodemographic factors including number of siblings in the home and family income were agents of developmental change in orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes in infancy.
Highlights
This study examined the role of bottom-up visual influences in guiding attention orienting to relevant stimuli in the environment, faces
Proportion Attended areas of interest (AOIs) We first asked whether orienting attention to faces in the first several fixations of scene presentation differed as a function of the bottom-up visual salience of the face
Taken together with the proportion attended faces data, these results suggest that visual salience does result in higher probability of getting to a face in cluttered natural scenes, but that it is unlikely to be predominantly driving getting to faces in the first year of life, potentially as a function of rapid change in visual skills
Summary
This study examined the role of bottom-up visual influences in guiding attention orienting to relevant stimuli in the environment, faces. Locations in a visual field that are most visually ‘salient’ attract bottom-up attention orienting mechanisms. The selected location is suppressed, perhaps through an inhibition of return mechanism, and the most salient location in the display is attended in succession. This framework is relevant for the first several fixations of scene viewing [3,4,6,9], as top-down information, perhaps task goals or otherwise informative stimuli, subsequently guides attention orienting
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