Infant Eye Gaze While Viewing Dynamic Faces.

Lisa M Oakes,Lisa M Cantrell,Michaela C Debolt,Annika T Voss,Aaron G Beckner

doi:10.3390/brainsci11020231

Lisa M Oakes, Lisa M Cantrell + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11020231

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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.

Highlights

Infants’ face processing has been the focus of research for decades
The availability of eye tracking systems that can be used with young infants has allowed us to probe how infants visually investigate faces, presumably providing understanding into how they learn about faces
All the code and data used to generate these analyses can be found in the Supplementary Materials section on Infant eye gaze while viewing dynamic faces OSF project page [35]

Summary

Introduction

Observation that newborn infants prefer face-like stimuli to other patterns, researchers have asked how they perceive, process, and remember faces. Research has revealed that by 5 to 6 months of age, infants can remember and discriminate upright oriented faces [2] and selectively attend to faces in cluttered visual arrays [3]. Xiao et al [5] found that Chinese 3- to 9-month-old infants looked more at the mouths of dynamic Chinese faces (e.g., women chewing with a neutral expression) than at static images of those same faces. Ayneto and Sebastian-Galles [7] found that monolingual 8-month-old infants looked longer at the mouth (than the eyes) of a White woman engaged in dynamic, non-linguistic activities (e.g., laughing)

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