Attentional biases in free viewing of complex scenes in preschoolers and adults

Abstract

Adult gaze behaviour towards naturalistic scenes is highly biased towards semantic object information. Little is known about the ontological development of these biases, nor about group-level differences in gaze behaviour between adults and pre-schoolers. Here, we let pre-schoolers (n = 34, 5 years) and adults (n = 42, age 18-59 years) freely view 40 complex scenes containing objects with different semantic attributes to compare their fixation behaviour. Results show that preschool children allocate a significantly larger proportion of dwell time towards Faces, Touched objects, Hands and objects with implied Motion, but significantly less on Text. Interestingly, fewer first fixations of pre-schoolers landed on either Faces or Text, but more on Touched objects, Hands and Bodies. Follow up analyses excluding Text fixations revealed attentional biases towards Touched objects and Hands in children vs. adults. These findings suggest a developmental antagonism between text and touched objects-hand salience, which would resonate with recent findings regarding ‘cortical recycling’. We discuss this and other potential mechanisms driving salience differences between children and adults.

Individual differences in looking at persons in scenes

“…These face-deprived macaques also showed decreased neuronal preferences for faces and enlarged cortical hand patches ( Arcaro et al, 2017 ). Similarly, recent findings suggest that face and word-selective patches of human ventral cortex developmentally expand at the expense of limb-preferring areas ( Nordt et al, 2021 ), echoing salience differences between preschool children and adults ( Linka, Sensoy, et al, 2022 ). Our present findings add to this converging evidence for a push–pull relationship between face and limb salience and show that it generalizes to (almost) all body parts as well as to individual differences between adults.…”

“…Differences in visual experience also modulate semantic saliency biases in humans. Preschool children fixate faces and hands significantly more often than adults but are less likely to fixate text elements in complex natural scenes ( Linka, Sensoy, Karimpur, Schwarzer, & de Haas, 2022 ). However, the saliency of different body parts for persons in scenes as well as potential related individual differences have yet to be studied systematically.…”

Individual fixation tendencies in person viewing generalize from images to videos

“…These face-deprived macaques showed smaller activation in cortical regions dedicated to faces but larger neuronal activation for hands ( Arcaro et al, 2017 ). Developmental studies suggest that similar push–pull mechanisms may play out in human ventral cortex ( Nordt et al, 2021 ) and gaze ( Broda & de Haas, 2022 ; Linka, Sensoy, et al, 2022 ). Our results confirm a crucial prediction of this hypothesis: individual differences in the way we distribute fixations across persons should generalize beyond static scenes.…”

Quick, eyes! Isolated upper face regions but not artificial features elicit rapid saccades

“…However, recent developmental findings suggest that such individual salience biases can be modulated by impactful experience, like learning to read (Linka et al, 2022). Similarly, macaques who grew up face deprived tend to fixate faces less, but hands more (Arcaro et al, 2017).…”

“…A further open question regarding ultra-rapid saccades is how plastic the underlying mechanisms are. Attentional orienting towards faces and face-like stimuli has been found for children of all ages starting from birth (Fantz, 1963;Farroni et al, 2005;Johnson et al, 1991Johnson et al, , 2015Linka et al, 2022) and even before (Reid et al, 2017). This may point to innate biases, a possibility further underscored by twin studies finding strong genetic components for the individual tendency to fixate faces in scenes (Constantino et al, 2017;Kennedy et al, 2017).…”