Abstract
The study of cognitive development hinges, largely, on the analysis of infant looking. But analyses of eye gaze data require the adoption of linking hypotheses: assumptions about the relationship between observed eye movements and underlying cognitive processes. We develop a general framework for constructing, testing, and comparing these hypotheses, and thus for producing new insights into early cognitive development. We first introduce the general framework – applicable to any infant gaze experiment – and then demonstrate its utility by analyzing data from a set of experiments investigating the role of attentional cues in infant learning. The new analysis uncovers significantly more structure in these data, finding evidence of learning that was not found in standard analyses and showing an unexpected relationship between cue use and learning rate. Finally, we discuss general implications for the construction and testing of quantitative linking hypotheses. MATLAB code for sample linking hypotheses can be found on the first author's website.
Highlights
The study of infant cognitive development hinges largely on the analysis of infant looking behavior [1]
This paper proposes a framework for the construction and analysis of quantitative linking hypotheses for data from eye gaze experiments
Wu and Kirkham [36] concluded that infants learn differently from social and non-social cues, and that the former can increase the likelihood of learning multi-modal regularities by 8 months of age. These findings provide insight into the role of attentional cues in infant learning: different cues can have a very different effect
Summary
The study of infant cognitive development hinges largely on the analysis of infant looking behavior [1]. Since Fantz’s [2] landmark demonstration of visual memory in 2-month-old infants, researchers have used his habituation technique, and other eye-movement methods, to ask deep theoretical questions about the ontogeny and development of human cognition. In order to connect observed eye-movements to underlying cognitive processes, one must define a linking hypothesis that relates them [1,4]. Every experimental paradigm used in the study of infant cognition commits – even if only implicitly – to a particular linking hypothesis. In violation of expectation studies [6,7], increased looking is hypothesized to indicate noticing a surprising event. All of these linking hypotheses are qualitative; they assert that a relationship exists but do not specify its quantitative, metric properties
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