Abstract
The development of selective visual attention is critical for effectively engaging with an ever-changing world. Its optimal deployment depends upon interactions between neural, motor, and sensory systems across multiple timescales and neurocognitive loci. Previous work illustrates the spatio-temporal dynamics of these processes in adults, but less is known about this emergent phenomenon early in life. Using data (n = 190; 421 visits) collected between 3 and 35 months of age, we examined the spatio-temporal complexity of young children’s gaze patterns as they viewed stimuli varying in semantic salience. Specifically, we used detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) to quantify the extent to which infants’ gaze patterns exhibited scale invariant patterns of nested variability, an organizational feature thought to reflect self-organized and optimally flexible system dynamics that are not overly rigid or random. Results indicated that gaze patterns of even the youngest infants exhibited fractal organization that increased with age. Further, fractal organization was greater when children (a) viewed social stimuli compared to stimuli with degraded social information and (b) when they spontaneously gazed at faces. These findings suggest that selective attention is well-organized in infancy, particularly toward social information, and indicate noteworthy growth in these processes across the first years of life.
Highlights
The development of selective visual attention is critical for effectively engaging with an ever-changing world
The kurtosis value is within the range of a normal distribution for large sample sizes[46]
The current study demonstrates that the developing visual attention system is dynamic and self-organized as early as 3 months of age
Summary
The development of selective visual attention is critical for effectively engaging with an ever-changing world. Fractal organization was greater when children (a) viewed social stimuli compared to stimuli with degraded social information and (b) when they spontaneously gazed at faces These findings suggest that selective attention is well-organized in infancy, toward social information, and indicate noteworthy growth in these processes across the first years of life. From a dynamic systems perspective, this real-time integration is thought to reflect the ‘soft assembly’ of neural, motor, and visceral processes, where the collective functioning of the system is an emergent (i.e., self-organized) property of its highly interactive constituent parts[2,3,4]. It encompasses many interacting sub-components with different organizational structures as well as many
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