Eye Tracking Examines Visual Perception in Infants

How do infants see? We’ve written on a number of recent studies involving infants, their anticipatory looks, observations, and how and when they first begin to understand the relation between actions and consequence. In another study published last month in the Association for Psychological Science’s Observer, researchers at the University of California, Davis, worked with eye tracking to observe infants’ peripheral visual ability.

Understanding how peripheral vision works is important in learning about the development of attention, recognition, and action in the developing stages. The study, which was led by Faraz Farzin of UC Davis and his counterparts measured the effect of crowding in an infant’s visual field. In studying crowding, Farzin was able to estimate the size of an infant’s “spotlight” – that is, the window that defines what we’re aware of visually.

As we know, peripheral vision is limited as far as detail and focus, and we can only determine minimal information in our periphery, especially when the scene is crowded. The study focused on a group of 6- to 15- month old babies equipped with eye tracking devices.

Each child was shown an image depicting a pair of faces, one upright and the other upside down. Some of the images were of faces alone and others were crowded with smaller images surrounding. The baby’s first saccade (we’ve discussed this term before, the rapid darting from fixation to fixation that takes place in the eye’s movement pattern) was tracked from their central fixation to one of the two faces they could choose from. The research showed that infants could indeed discriminate faces in their periphery, but it was also apparent that crowding objects impaired their ability to do so.

The results also suggested that an infant’s visual scene is more blurred than that of an adult. An infant’s visual world includes a “jumbled mass of unbound features” whereas an adult’s is less so.

The research was reportedly the first quantitative study of the effect on crowding within an infant’s visual perception, and researchers have found that younger infants experience far more “coarser resolution of conscious visual perception” than adults. This implies a number of implications for scientists’ understanding of visual and visuomotor development in children.

Inside the Infant Eye

Related articles:

1. Where’s Waldo?… Eye Tracking Only Registers Half of the Visual Search Process
2. Pupil Tracking Could Lead to Early Intervention for Infants With Autism
3. How Does Eye Tracking Detect the Object of Visual Attention?
4. Understanding An Infant’s Actions Through Eye Tracking
5. Eye Tracking Studies Effect of Motion on Autistic Infants
6. Eye Tracking Reveals the World Through Babies’ Eyes
7. Eye Tracking … Baby-Style