Eye Tracking … Baby-Style
Wouldn’t it be interesting to see the world from the perspective of an infant as it explores its surroundings? Observing looking behavior in infants can provide valuable information about perception, cognition, and social development because visual information obtained through fixations on environmental elements often guides physical actions. Natural vision behavior is the best way to study eye movement during everyday activities and social interactions; however, collecting this information is not an easy undertaking, especially when it comes to infants.
Most current eye tracking technologies require a laboratory setup to record eye movement patterns. The problem with this is a laboratory environment is restricting, and structured tasks prohibit natural looking behavior. Equipment setup and calibration, and controlled procedures are difficult enough for adults to tolerate; can you imagine trying to get a squirming baby to cooperate during any one of these?
In attempt to overcome the eye-tracking challenges that prohibit the collection of data on eye behavior during spontaneous movement, a group of researchers from New York University, in collaboration with Positive Science, LLC, developed the first head-mounted eye-tracking device to be used on walking infants. The wireless head gear is constructed from a lightweight, stretchy spandex cap fitted with one outward facing “scene” camera and one “eye” camera to record movement of the right eye. The eye tracking software incorporated a flexible, quick calibration procedure and wirelessly transmitted video from both cameras.
The research group published a paper on their findings as recorded the eye movement of six 14-month-old babies fitted with the new eye tracking device as they engaged in spontaneous play with their mothers in a room well-stocked with toys and obstacles. The key areas of interest were eye movement behaviors during obstacle navigation, object exploration, and response to mothers’ vocalization.
Although the goal of the study was to prove that the new eye tracking methodology was a viable way to capture natural vision behavior in infants, the research also discovered some interesting findings. Infants frequently fixate on objects and obstacles before interacting with them. They also found that, unlike adults and older children, babies tend to fixate on their own feet before placing them on an obstacle, and they also monitor an object closely before their hands approach and touch it. Probably the least surprising result to anyone who has ever had a child is that the babies only looked at the mothers half the time she vocalized, thus demonstrating that the selective hearing behavior that drives parents nuts is developed at a very early age.
Head-mounted eye-tracking of infantsʼ natural interactions: A new method
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