Abstract
Online data collection with infants raises special opportunities and challenges for developmental research. One of the most prevalent methods in infancy research is eye-tracking, which has been widely applied in laboratory settings to assess cognitive development. Technological advances now allow conducting eye-tracking online with various populations, including infants. However, the accuracy and reliability of online infant eye-tracking remain to be comprehensively evaluated. No research to date has directly compared webcam-based and in-lab eye-tracking data from infants, similarly to data from adults. The present study provides a direct comparison of in-lab and webcam-based eye-tracking data from infants who completed an identical looking time paradigm in two different settings (in the laboratory or online at home). We assessed 4-6-month-old infants (n = 38) in an eye-tracking task that measured the detection of audio-visual asynchrony. Webcam-based and in-lab eye-tracking data were compared on eye-tracking and video data quality, infants’ viewing behavior, and experimental effects. Results revealed no differences between the in-lab and online setting in the frequency of technical issues and participant attrition rates. Video data quality was comparable between settings in terms of completeness and brightness, despite lower frame rate and resolution online. Eye-tracking data quality was higher in the laboratory than online, except in case of relative sample loss. Gaze data quantity recorded by eye-tracking was significantly lower than by video in both settings. In valid trials, eye-tracking and video data captured infants’ viewing behavior uniformly, irrespective of setting. Despite the common challenges of infant eye-tracking across experimental settings, our results point toward the necessity to further improve the precision of online eye-tracking with infants. Taken together, online eye-tracking is a promising tool to assess infants’ gaze behavior but requires careful data quality control. The demographic composition of both samples differed from the generic population on caregiver education: our samples comprised caregivers with higher-than-average education levels, challenging the notion that online studies will per se reach more diverse populations.
Highlights
The current worldwide pandemic situation necessitated a change to online data collection methods for developmental psychology research (Lourenco and Tasimi, 2020)
In the current unmoderated online study, we aimed to compare the feasibility of in-lab and online infant eye-tracking in a preferential-looking paradigm, which assessed infants’ audio-visual synchrony perception
In the remaining sub-sample, maternal education level was significantly higher in the online than in the in-lab group, W = 103, p = 0.05; whereas paternal education level did not differ between groups, W = 121, p = 0.38
Summary
The current worldwide pandemic situation necessitated a change to online data collection methods for developmental psychology research (Lourenco and Tasimi, 2020). A switch to remote data collection has been challenging for infant studies that mostly rely on in-person observation methods (Rhodes et al, 2020). Prior research shows that infants only become able to initiate joint visual attention by the age of 16 months during online interactions (McClure et al, 2018), moderated experiments mostly rely on observations of parental and infant behavior (Libertus and Violi, 2016; Daghighi et al, 2020; Oliver and Pike, 2021). A recent unmoderated online study with 8-12year-old children confirmed that participant attrition, task comprehensibility, technological difficulties, and parental interference pose no major challenges in such experiments (Nussenbaum et al, 2020). Available research suggests that online methods are a feasible and helpful tool for studying developmental questions
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