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1. Parent attention‐orienting behavior is associated with neural entropy in infancy

   https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12595  

   Williams, Cabell_L; Belkowitz, Allison_R; Nance, Madelyn_G; Mortman, Emily_T; Bae, Sonie; Ahmed, Sheher‐Bano; Puglia, Meghan_H (April 2024, Infancy)

   Abstract Parents use joint attention to direct infants to environmental stimuli. We hypothesized that infants whose parents provide more bids for joint attention will display a more complex neural response when viewing social scenes. Sixty‐one 8‐month‐old infants underwent electroencephalography (EEG) while viewing videos of joint‐ and parallel‐play and participated in a free play interaction. EEG data was analyzed using multiscale entropy, which quantifies neural variability. Free play interactions assessed parent alternating gaze, a behavioral mechanism for directing attention to environmental cues. We found a significant positive association between parent alternating gaze and neural entropy in frontal and central regions. These results suggest a relationship between parent behavior and infant neural mechanisms that regulate social attention, underlying the importance of parental cues in forming neural networks. 

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2. The infant’s view redefines the problem of referential uncertainty in early word learning

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107019118  

   Yu, Chen; Zhang, Yayun; Slone, Lauren K.; Smith, Linda B. (December 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   The learning of first object names is deemed a hard problem due to the uncertainty inherent in mapping a heard name to the intended referent in a cluttered and variable world. However, human infants readily solve this problem. Despite considerable theoretical discussion, relatively little is known about the uncertainty infants face in the real world. We used head-mounted eye tracking during parent–infant toy play and quantified the uncertainty by measuring the distribution of infant attention to the potential referents when a parent named both familiar and unfamiliar toy objects. The results show that infant gaze upon hearing an object name is often directed to a single referent which is equally likely to be a wrong competitor or the intended target. This bimodal gaze distribution clarifies and redefines the uncertainty problem and constrains possible solutions. 

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3. Self‐generated variability in object images predicts vocabulary growth

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12816  

   Slone, Lauren K.; Smith, Linda B.; Yu, Chen (April 2019, Developmental Science)

   Abstract Object names are a major component of early vocabularies and learning object names depends on being able to visually recognize objects in the world. However, the fundamental visual challenge of the moment‐to‐moment variations in object appearances that learners must resolve has received little attention in word learning research. Here we provide the first evidence that image‐level object variability matters and may be the link that connects infant object manipulation to vocabulary development. Using head‐mounted eye tracking, the present study objectively measured individual differences in the moment‐to‐moment variability of visual instances of the same object, from infants’ first‐person views. Infants who generated more variable visual object images through manual object manipulation at 15 months of age experienced greater vocabulary growth over the next six months. Elucidating infants’ everyday visual experiences with objects may constitute a crucial missing link in our understanding of the developmental trajectory of object name learning. 

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4. Visual preferences for direct‐gaze faces in infant macaques ( Macaca mulatta ) with limited face exposure

   https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.21797  

   Simpson, Elizabeth A.; Paukner, Annika; Pedersen, Eric J.; Ferrari, Pier F.; Parr, Lisa A. (October 2018, Developmental Psychobiology)

   Abstract From birth, human and nonhuman primates attend more to faces with direct gaze compared with averted gaze, and previous studies report that attention to the eyes is linked to the emergence of later social skills. Here, we explored whether early experiences influence attraction to eye contact in infant macaques by examining their attention to face pairs varying in their gaze direction across the first 13 weeks of life. Infants raised by human caretakers had limited conspecific interactions (nursery‐reared;N = 16) and were compared to infants raised in rich social environments (mother‐reared;N = 20). Both groups looked longer to faces and the eyes of direct compared to averted‐gaze faces. Looking to all faces and eyes also increased with age. Nursery‐reared infants did not display age‐associated increases in attention to direct‐gaze faces specifically, suggesting that, while there may be an initial preference for direct‐gaze faces from birth, social experiences may support its early development. 

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5. Scene saliencies in egocentric vision and their creation by parents and infants

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105256  

   Anderson, Erin M; Seemiller, Eric S; Smith, Linda B (December 2022, Cognition)

   Across the lifespan, humans are biased to look first at what is easy to see, with a handful of well-documented visual saliences shaping our attention (e.g., Itti & Koch, 2001). These attentional biases may emerge from the contexts in which moment-tomoment attention occurs, where perceivers and their social partners actively shape bottom-up saliences, moving their bodies and objects to make targets of interest more salient. The goal of the present study was to determine the bottom-up saliences present in infant egocentric images and to provide evidence on the role that infants and their mature social partners play in highlighting targets of interest via these saliences. We examined 968 unique scenes in which an object had purposefully been placed in the infant’s egocentric view, drawn from videos created by one-year-old infants wearing a head camera during toy-play with a parent. To understand which saliences mattered in these scenes, we conducted a visual search task, asking participants (n = 156) to find objects in the egocentric images. To connect this to the behaviors of perceivers, we then characterized the saliences of objects placed by infants or parents compared to objects that were otherwise present in the scenes. Our results show that body-centric properties, such as increases in the centering and visual size of the object, as well as decreases in the number of competing objects immediately surrounding it, both predicted faster search time and distinguished placed and unplaced objects. The present results suggest that the bottom-up saliences that can be readily controlled by perceivers and their social partners may most strongly impact our attention. This finding has implications for the functional role of saliences in human vision, their origin, the social structure of perceptual environments, and how the relation between bottom-up and top-down control of attention in these environments may support infant learning. 

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