Visual attention and language exposure during everyday activities: an at-home study of early word learning using wearable eye trackers

Abstract

Early language learning relies on statistical regularities that exist across timescales in infants’ lives. Two types of these statistical regularities are the routine activities that make up their day, such as mealtime and play, and the real-time repeated behaviors that make up the moment-by-moment dynamics of those routines. These two types of regularities are different in nature and are embedded at two different temporal scales, which led to divergent research in the literature – those who collect long-form recordings and observations of at-home behavior and those who use eye trackers and micro-level analyses to quantify real-time behavior in laboratories. The goal of present paper is to jointly examine and connect the statistical regularities at these two timescales. Towards this goal, we brought wearable eye trackers to English- and Spanish-speaking families’ homes to record parent and toddler visual attention during daily routines. We transcribed parent speech during object play and mealtime and coded toddler visual attention during naming moments. We found that parents and toddlers jointly interacted with the unique vocabularies of the two activities. Although naming and attention were more coordinated during object play, mealtime still afforded opportunities for high-quality naming moments. Our results lay the building blocks for connecting these two lines of research and demonstrate the feasibility of at-home data collection with eye trackers.

The real‐time effects of parent speech on infants' multimodal attention and dyadic coordination

“…The HOME lab environment is designed to answer this question as we can collect data from parent‐infant interactions across a diversity of tasks, including book reading, play with more interactive toys (like a ball maze), meal preparation and feeding (Peters et al., 2020), and “grooming” the infant (after particularly messy snack times). Expanding our studies of dyadic behavior to different routines will improve our understanding of parental responsiveness in different contexts and the mechanisms underlying language learning and cognitive development (Schroer et al., 2022; Tamis‐LeMonda et al., 2019).…”

Daylong egocentric recordings in small- and large-scale language communities: A practical introduction

“…The bulk of this research has focused on children's visual input-how often different objects are in view (Clerkin & Smith, 2022;B. Long et al, 2021), how often they are the focus of joint attention (Bergelson et al, 2019;Schroer et al, 2022), or how often they are interacted with by children and their caregivers (Suarez-Rivera et al, 2022;Swirbul et al, 2022). Some studies have taken advantage of information provided in the visual signal to characterize other aspects of children's home experiences, including their physical proximity to (Suarez-Rivera et al, 2023) and touch or gesture from adult caregivers (Abu-Zhaya et al, 2017;Kosie & Lew-Williams, 2023), along with their physical location in space throughout the home (Custode & Tamis-LeMonda, 2020;Roy et al, 2015).…”

“…In recent years, we have seen the development of many new systems for capturing at-home egocentric video data, including head-worn cameras, such as BabyView (B. Long et al, 2023) and EgoActive (Geangu et al, 2023), as well as advancements in head-mounted eye-trackers (Schroer et al, 2022). Personal security cameras (similar to police cameras) open up another off-the-shelf option.…”

“…Examples of different egocentric video-recording devices. (A) chest-worn video security camera (Boblov 64GB N9 Mini with attached fisheye lens) in a custom shirt and attached lens cover lasts most of a waking day, (B) chest-worn photo camera (Narrative Clip 1 with attached fisheye lens) and audio recorder (Olympus WS-832) in a custom vest, (C) BabyView head-mounted camera (Long et al, 2023), (D) 2 Looxcie cameras attached to headband(Bergelson et al, 2019), (E) Wearable eye-tracker mounted to glasses(Schroer et al, 2022).…”