An Eye Tracking Investigation of Developmental Change in Bottom-up Attention Orienting to Faces in Cluttered Natural Scenes

Abstract

This study examined the contribution of visual salience to bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes across development. We eye tracked participants 4 months to 24 years of age as they freely viewed 16 natural scenes, all of which had faces in them. In half, the face was also the winner-take-all salient area in the display as determined by the MATLAB SaliencyToolbox. In the other half, a random location was the winner-take-all salient area in the display and the face was visually non-salient. We found that proportion of attended faces, in the first second of scene viewing, improved after the first year. Visually salient faces attracted bottom-up attention orienting more than non-salient faces reliably and robustly only after infancy. Preliminary data indicate that this shift to use of visual salience to guide bottom-up attention orienting after infancy may be a function of stabilization of visual skills. Moreover, sociodemographic factors including number of siblings in the home and family income were agents of developmental change in orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes in infancy.

The development of visual search in infancy: Attention to faces versus salience.

“…This is similar to our finding that 6-month-old infants attended to the faces in our arrays despite the fact those faces were rarely the most physically salient item in the array. Similarly, Amso et al (2014) observed that infants’ looking at faces in naturalistic scenes was not a function of how salient those faces were in those scenes. Thus, these previous studies examined infants’ attention to more or less salient faces .…”

“…Di Giorgio, Turati, Altoè, and Simion (2012) found that 6-month-old infants, but not 3-month-old infants, looked longer than expected by chance at faces presented in static arrays of 4 or 6 complex objects. During free viewing of the scenes in Figure 1, Amso et al (2014) observed that looking time to faces increased between 4 and 24 months, although this was not the main focus of their study.…”

“…Consider the images depicted in Figure 1, taken from Amso, Haas, and Markant’s (2014) study of developmental changes in attention. The images on the left illustrate the overwhelming complexity of our everyday environment—each scene contains many different shapes and colors, with more objects that can be processed all at once.…”

Audio-visual speech perception in infants and toddlers with Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, and Williams syndrome

“…(1) looking longer at the congruent face than the incongruent face in a 'Mismatch' condition, in which an auditory /ga/ is matched with a visual /ga/ for the congruent face, and a visual /ba/ (to produce the non-English syllabic /bga/) for the incongruent face (thus demonstrating intermodal matching [see Figure 1]); while (2) failing to discriminate between the congruent face and the incongruent face in a 'Fusion' condition (i.e., by looking at both faces equally), which is when an auditory /ba/ is matched with a visual /ga/ to produce the normal English syllabic percept /da/ for the incongruent face (and the English syllabic /ba/ for the congruent face) (Figure 1). In other words, in the Fusion condition, the TD controls should perceive conflicting percepts in both the congruent face and incongruent face (see Figure 2 for a hypothetical depiction of the predictions).…”

Toward Early Markers for Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Eye Tracking

“…Inclusion of participants or trials based on data quality is mostly based on the amount of data that was recorded. ;Hunnius, de Wit, Vrins, & von Hofsten (2011);, for instance, excluded trials based on inattention, and Amso, Haas, & Markant (2014) excluded participants with less than 30% valid data achieved during a recording. In addition, there are studies that specify a minimum accuracy at calibration before preceding with the study (e.g.…”