Infants’ shifts of gaze from a central to a peripheral stimulus: a longitudinal study of development between 6 and 26 weeks

Associations between the developmental trajectories of visual scanning and disengagement of attention in infants

“…Both measures have been used and shown to be suitable to describe the development of visual scanning and disengagement in earlier studies (see, e.g., Bronson, 1994;Butcher et al, 2000). The frequency measures consisted of the relative frequency of looks to the peripheral target in the disengagement task and the number of fixations during scanning.…”

“…The models had three levels: infant, test session, and stimulus sort. Based on the results of earlier analyses (see, e.g., Butcher et al, 2000;Hunnius & Geuze, 2004a), the development was described using three piecewise linear age functions (age periods 6-9, 9-16 and 16-26 weeks). The data were centered around 12 weeks of age, as this was approximately the middle of the period in which the largest changes were expected.…”

“…As infants grow older, the frequency and speed of shifts of gaze from a stimulus to a target which appears in the periphery increase. By approximately 4 months of age, infants are able to shift their attention and gaze easily and rapidly, and staring behavior becomes rare (Butcher, Kalverboer, & Geuze, 2000;Hicks & Richards, 1998;Hood & Atkinson, 1993).…”

Infants' emerging ability to represent occluded object motion

“…Infants' ability to shift attention to new objects improved dramatically between 9 and 12 weeks of age. Butcher et al (2000) found that 12-week-old infants reliably turned gaze toward a new stimulus presented in the peripheral visual field whether or not the stimulus they were fixating remained on. If young infants' representations of occluded moving objects are weak, it is expected that they will continue to fixate the occluder edge after the object has disappeared and show a relative inability to regain tracking after the object has reappeared.…”

Combining embodied models and empirical research for understanding the development of shared attention

“…Though its role in social learning is seldom discussed, we hypothesize that "triadic interactions," in which infant and caregiver attend to one another and to a third object/event (e.g., a spoon for feeding), rest on a cycle of habituation in which attention to an object of attention (e.g., spoon) decreases over time, resulting in shift of attention to another object (e.g., adult's face). Butcher et al (2000) showed that between 8 and 12 weeks, infants begin to shift visual attention from a central stimulus when a peripheral stimulus is introduced. More specifically, by 6 months infants begin breaking mutual gaze with their mother to look at distal objects.…”