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Eye movement patterns and visual attention during scene viewing in 3- to 12-month-olds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2016

ANDREA HELO ,
PIA RÄMÄ ,
SEBASTIAN PANNASCH  and
DAVID MEARY
ANDREA HELO*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France Departamento de Fonoaudiología, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
PIA RÄMÄ
Affiliation:
Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France CNRS (UMR 8242), Paris, France
SEBASTIAN PANNASCH
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Engineering Psychology and Applied Cognitive Research, Technische Universitaet Dresden, Dresden, Germany
DAVID MEARY
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition, Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble, France
*
*Address correspondence to: Andrea Helo, 45 rue des Saint-Pères, 75006 Paris, France. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Recently, two attentional modes have been associated with specific eye movement patterns during scene processing. Ambient mode, characterized by short fixations and long saccades during early scene inspection, is associated with localization of objects. Focal mode, characterized by longer fixations, is associated with more detailed object feature processing during later inspection phase. The aim of the present study was to investigate the development of these attentional modes. More specifically, we examined whether indications of ambient and focal attention modes are similar in infants and adults. Therefore, we measured eye movements in 3- to 12-months-old infants while exploring visual scenes. Our results show that both adults and 12-month-olds had shorter fixation durations within the first 1.5 s of scene viewing compared with later time phases (>2.5 s); indicating that there was a transition from ambient to focal processing during image inspection. In younger infants, fixation durations between two viewing phases did not differ. Our results suggest that at the end of the first year of life, infants have developed an adult-like scene viewing behavior. The evidence for the existence of distinct attentional processing mechanisms during early infancy furthermore underlines the importance of the concept of the two modes.

Keywords

Scene perceptionVisual developmentAmbient and focal processingEye movementsInfants
Type
Brief Communication
Information
Visual Neuroscience , Volume 33 , 2016 , E014
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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