Preschoolers’ oculomotor behaviour during their observation of an action task

Abstract

Adult and child oculomotor behaviour was measured during the observation of a naturalistic action task. Adult and 4-year-old participants viewed a video presentation of an actor making a root-beer float. Eye movements were monitored to examine fixation patterns during a series of means-end action sequences. Look-ahead fixations (i.e., gaze anticipation) were measured to determine if children would saccade to the goal site prior to the completion of each action sequence as adults do. Look-ahead fixations were observed in both the adult and child groups, with no significant age differences found in levels of gaze anticipation.The ability to interpret goal-directed sequential actions, as well as perform multiple steps in problem-solving tasks in a planful manner, has obvious adaptive significance. As the building blocks of social cognition, human beings need to comprehend these types of behaviours in order to understand desires, intentions, and agency of others. The capacity to link actions that occur together enables one to form coherent representations of action sequences at the level of intention as opposed to the level of the action unit. Adults and children show the propensity to interpret others' actions as well as perform these actions

Video Deficit in Toddlers’ Object Retrieval: What Eye Movements Reveal About Online Cognition

“…The technician loaded a previously saved calibration file and adjusted it to the current viewer as needed to ensure that the gaze position fixated talking heads during the calibration video. This “calibration offset” procedure has been used in previous research with young children (Morgante, Haddad, & Keen, ) and is sufficient for the relatively coarse spatial resolution required in this study. The same procedure was used for all participants, so any error in calibration should be distributed evenly across conditions.…”

“…This did not differ for children in the In‐person (82%) and Video conditions (83%). This rate of data loss is common for studies that record eye movements while toddlers watch video, particularly with remote pan/tilt eye trackers such as the one used here (Kirkorian et al., ; Morgante et al., ).…”

“…The most obvious limitation of the current study is the amount of eye‐movement data that was captured. This rate of data loss is common when using remote eye‐tracking systems, particularly with toddlers (Kirkorian et al., ; Morgante et al., ). The proportion of usable data samples did not predict search performance on a given trial, suggesting that data loss was not systematic (at least with respect to the behavior of interest).…”

Eye tracking in early autism research

“…Thus, there is no need for head-mounted equipment or other obtrusive devices that reduce the comfort of infants and children and their willingness to participate. The use of corneal reflection eye tracking is not new [ 22 , 23 ], but recent advances in computer capacities and eye tracking algorithms have promoted the development of several easy-to-use and robust eye tracking systems (for reviews, see [ 20 , 24 ]). Eye tracking both improves measures obtainable with less advanced methods (for example, coding from video) and adds measures not available by other means, including fine-grained scanpath and fixation analyses [ 25 ].…”