An official website of the United States government
Abstract Humans detect faces efficiently from a young age. Face detection is critical for infants to identify and learn from relevant social stimuli in their environments. Faces with eye contact are an especially salient stimulus, and attention to the eyes in infancy is linked to the emergence of later sociality. Despite the importance of both of these early social skills—attending to faces and attending to the eyes—surprisingly little is known about how they interact. We used eye tracking to explore whether eye contact influences infants' face detection. Longitudinally, we examined 2‐, 4‐, and 6‐month‐olds' (N = 65) visual scanning of complex image arrays with human and animal faces varying in eye contact and head orientation. Across all ages, infants displayed superior detection of faces with eye contact; however, this effect varied as a function of species and head orientation. Infants were more attentive to human than animal faces and were more sensitive to eye and head orientation for human faces compared to animal faces. Unexpectedly, human faces with both averted heads and eyes received the most attention. This pattern may reflect the early emergence of gaze following—the ability to look where another individual looks—which begins to develop around this age. Infants may be especially interested in averted gaze faces, providing early scaffolding for joint attention. This study represents the first investigation to document infants' attention patterns to faces systematically varying in their attentional states. Together, these findings suggest that infants develop early, specialized functional conspecific face detection.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2025
Developmental Changes in How Head Orientation Structures Infants’ Visual Attention
ABSTRACT Most studies of developing visual attention are conducted using screen‐based tasks in which infants move their eyes to select where to look. However, real‐world visual exploration entails active movements of both eyes and head to bring relevant areas in view. Thus, relatively little is known about how infants coordinate their eyes and heads to structure their visual experiences. Infants were tested every 3 months from 9 to 24 months while they played with their caregiver and three toys while sitting in a highchair at a table. Infants wore a head‐mounted eye tracker that measured eye movement toward each of the visual targets (caregiver's face and toys) and how targets were oriented within the head‐centered field of view (FOV). With age, infants increasingly aligned novel toys in the center of their head‐centered FOV at the expense of their caregiver's face. Both faces and toys were better centered in view during longer looking events, suggesting that infants of all ages aligned their eyes and head to sustain attention. The bias in infants’ head‐centered FOV could not be accounted for by manual action: Held toys were more poorly centered compared with non‐held toys. We discuss developmental factors—attentional, motoric, cognitive, and social—that may explain why infants increasingly adopted biased viewpoints with age.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1941449
- PAR ID:
- 10560487
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Developmental Psychobiology
- Volume:
- 66
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 0012-1630
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This study examined the immediate effects of mask-wearing on infant selective visual attention to audiovisual speech in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Infants distribute their selective attention to regions of a speaker's face differentially based on their age and language experience. However, the potential impact wearing a face mask may have on infants' selective attention to audiovisual speech has not been systematically studied. We utilized eye tracking to examine the proportion of infant looking time to the eyes and mouth of a masked or unmasked actress speaking in a familiar or unfamiliar language. Six-month-old and 12-month-old infants (n= 42, 55% female, 91% White Non-Hispanic/Latino) were shown videos of an actress speaking in a familiar language (English) with and without a mask on, as well as videos of the same actress speaking in an unfamiliar language (German) with and without a mask. Overall, infants spent more time looking at the unmasked presentations compared to the masked presentations. Regardless of language familiarity or age, infants spent more time looking at the mouth area of an unmasked speaker and they spent more time looking at the eyes of a masked speaker. These findings indicate mask-wearing has immediate effects on the distribution of infant selective attention to different areas of the face of a speaker during audiovisual speech.more » « less
-
Virtual reality sickness typically results from visual-vestibular conflict. Because self-motion from optical flow is driven most strongly by motion at the periphery of the retina, reducing the user’s field-of-view (FOV) during locomotion has proven to be an effective strategy to minimize visual vestibular conflict and VR sickness. Current FOV restrictor implementations reduce the user’s FOV by rendering a restrictor whose center is fixed at the center of the head mounted display (HMD), which is effective when the user’s eye gaze is aligned with head gaze. However, during eccentric eye gaze, users may look at the FOV restrictor itself, exposing them to peripheral optical flow which could lead to increased VR sickness. To address these limitations, we develop a foveated FOV restrictor and we explore the effect of dynamically moving the center of the FOV restrictor according to the user’s eye gaze position. We conducted a user study (n=22) where each participant uses a foveated FOV restrictor and a head-fixed FOV restrictor while navigating a virtual environment. We found no statistically significant difference in VR sickness measures or noticeability between both restrictors. However, there was a significant difference in eye gaze behavior, as measured by eye gaze dispersion, with the foveated FOV restrictor allowing participants to have a wider visual scan area compared to the head-fixed FOV restrictor, which confined their eye gaze to the center of the FOV.more » « less
-
Abstract Traditionally, the exogenous control of gaze by external saliencies and the endogenous control of gaze by knowledge and context have been viewed as competing systems, with late infancy seen as a period of strengthening top‐down control over the vagaries of the input. Here we found that one‐year‐old infants control sustained attention through head movements that increase the visibility of the attended object. Freely moving one‐year‐old infants ( n = 45) wore head‐mounted eye trackers and head motion sensors while exploring sets of toys of the same physical size. The visual size of the objects, a well‐documented salience, varied naturally with the infant's moment‐to‐moment posture and head movements. Sustained attention to an object was characterized by the tight control of head movements that created and then stabilized a visual size advantage for the attended object for sustained attention. The findings show collaboration between exogenous and endogenous attentional systems and suggest new hypotheses about the development of sustained visual attention.more » « less
-
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.more » « less
